• by Aaron Baar , July 14, 2008

With less than a month to go before the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Visa is expecting consumers to start getting into the spirit, and hoping they're in a mood to share.

To coincide with the launch of its online campaign this week, the credit card company -- which has been an Olympic sponsor since 1986 -- has set up a Web site in which consumers can share stories of how Olympic athletes have inspired them to do great things.

"We felt it really helped to support the Olympic spirit and the human spirit," Elysa Gray, Visa's head of media and creative services, tells Marketing Daily. "We recognize that not everyone is going to go to the Olympics, but the Olympics touch everyone in some way."

The user-generated stories will run alongside inspiring biographical stories of Olympic athletes already featured in Visa's marketing. The expectation is that people will share stories beyond watching from their couches as Kerri Strug hit a perfect landing to win the gold, Gray says. "We want it to be about capturing the human spirit and how it affects people," she says.

To that end, the company has already videotaped fans at the Olympic trials and on the street to seed the site with inspirational stories. In one story, an older man named David Guy tells of the 1960 Olympics when Wilma Rudolph (whom he describes as a girl "from the backwoods of Tennessee") became the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field during a single Games.

While the company will promote the mircrosite through its television and print advertising, the heaviest push for the user generated content will come through an online campaign that kicks off this week (of 7/14). With expectations high that many people will watch the Olympics via the Internet or mobile devices, Visa's online marketing program has grown in importance, Gray says.

"The whole media landscape has changed, and it's no longer just about the 30-second spot," she says. "A lot of people will be consuming the Olympics online, and that's why we need to have a big online component."