Lance Glinn:

Welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Frank Cooper. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Visa. Frank, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House. Happy to have you here.

Frank Cooper:

Lance, great to be here.

Lance Glinn:

So, I want to begin big picture for our listeners on the B2AI study for the first time. And now this is a study put out by Visa Results Are In. What was just the motivation first behind Visa launching it and the questions that you were hoping to answer with this study?

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. I'm so excited about this study because we've been very familiar with the idea of marketing to consumers. We're very B2C. We're very familiar with the idea of marketing to businesses, B2B. But there's a new customer segment. And that's what B2AI means. It's the rise of AI agents as a customer segment. And who's going to review your product? Who's going to recommend it and eventually buy it autonomously? It's agents. And so, for us, we wanted to understand, so what are the motivations that people have? What are the fears, the blockers that would prevent them from adopting this? And what are their aspirations when they look at AI agents as part of their shopping and travel experiences? So, that was the underlying motivation.

Lance Glinn:

And so, you talked about, you have B2B studies, you have B2C studies, this B2AI. What just makes this research different from the typical consumer or the business surveys that we've seen before around emerging tech? Because now you're focusing solely on this technological innovation.

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. I mean, look, money tech, you can go back to the ATMs and the trajectory is pretty similar. People start off wary. You take an ATM in 1960s and '70s, there's low trust. People were thinking, "I'm not giving my cash to a machine." Banks installed the machines and there was a little uptake at that time. But then you started to see distribution. You started to see the network effects, people participating in it. You crossed that trust threshold. And so, for us, we wanted to know what would it take to get consumers to cross the trust threshold with AI agents, AI-driven commerce. And that's what the study really took a look at. And it was fascinating because you could see that there was already adoption of AI as part of the shopping experience, but there was a fear. And that fear was, I want to have control. I want to have some autonomy.

And so, you saw about 53% of the people would say, yes, I use it in some part of my shopping experience and I enjoy it. But about half of that, 27% would say, but I don't want that agent buying for me autonomously. And I certainly want to have some control over it. About 40% would roughly say, I want to be able to stop the purchase if possible. But I think we're at that early stage of that S-curve, where people are just now starting to get an understanding of what does it mean to have an AI agent shop for you. And so, I think we're just at the beginning of it.

Lance Glinn:

And so, there's a real intersection nowadays of technology, culture, and commerce. They're all coming together. With that convergence happening, why did Visa feel like now was the time to study AI, not just as a tool really, but as a behavior, right? Seeing how people are using it and how they feel it can be used moving forward.

Frank Cooper:

Mainly because I think it's going to be so fundamentally different from what we used to think about when we wanted to attract and retain and create preference with people alone. So, with people, we've thought about emotions first. I was like, okay, emotions are behavioral... economists have taught us all that emotions drive the behavior and then you rationalize it. And so, we're sending emotional communications. We deal with limited memory and limited capacity for attention, and so don't overload people with the messaging. All this becomes irrelevant when you're communicating with a machine. Machine can read hundreds of pages at a time, doesn't matter.

Lance Glinn:

It's emotionless.

Frank Cooper:

No emotion. And they don't see your billboards. They don't care about the tiers. Put a baby in the commercial, they don't really care. The machines don't care. But what the machine does need is that it has to be readable and it has to be trusted. But most importantly, it has to trigger a response from the human at the other end that what I received was effective. And so, for us, it just changes the sales funnel in such a fundamental way. We wanted to understand how can we get ahead of that curve as we start to communicate with both humans on the beginning of the prompt, but also the machines in the middle and then humans at the end again.

Lance Glinn:

And I think whenever you go into a study like this, you have your own expectations, right? Not necessarily a bias, but just expectations of what you think the results could bring. Whether it be about how consumers are using AI, the pace of its adoption, who's using AI, how did the results match what you and the Visa team may have thought prior to putting this study out?

Frank Cooper:

You're right, because with the study, you're always looking for that moment where consumers say something that just parts the clouds and the sun comes through and you're like, "Well, I didn't expect that." For the most part, the study was consistent with what we thought might happen, which is there is an appetite for AI-driven commerce, but there's fear about AI-driven commerce. And what we hope the study would give us is a little more clarity about what are the barriers. What are the factors of fear that will prevent people from moving forward? And what I was pleased to see is that you can see the adoption on the business side. So, there's a B2B opportunity clearly, and that's moving much faster than the pure consumer side. But I was also happy to hear that people have an appetite to adopt it if you can start to create the infrastructure, the network effect, the social proof, the ubiquitous distribution that's always given them confidence about when money, technology, and trust can intersect.

Lance Glinn:

And so, I think a study is really only as valuable as what you do with it after the fact. You take these results and then you have to then turn these results into something, whether that be something tangible, intangible. How is Visa planning on or maybe even now taking these insights and translating them into products, into tools, guidance, partnerships, so be it?

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. I mean, these studies are basically facts and observations and data points. We try to translate that into insights. Again, what are the blockers for adoption? And so, the Visa Intelligent Commerce platform is essentially a response to that. And what we get clarity on is that people want more confidence about identity. Is the person behind the agent a real person? And so, you get trusted agent protocol from that, from Visa. They want to get greater comfort around authorization. Does this agent have the authority to actually make this purchase at a certain spin level? So, Visa Acceptance platform fits into that category.

They want to know about liability. What happens if something goes wrong, if there's fraud? How do I know this transaction is secure? And so, we're creating a set of platforms and protocols and APIs that allow for a more seamless delivery of AI-driven commerce, but also to create that trust layer so that people feel more secure in the transaction and understand that their identity, authorization and liability is covered.

Lance Glinn:

And you mentioned that word trust again. And you spoke a couple of questions ago about that trust threshold that needs to be crossed for people to really have the confidence, and these AI agents to be able to one day maybe make purchases on their behalf. How do you get to that point of crossing that trust threshold? Is it commercialization? Is it proof of concept? How do you determine or how do you help people determine that now is the time that we can finally trust this?

Frank Cooper:

Sometimes it's unpredictable. Contactless, for example, really didn't hit the inflection point until the pandemic. Lots of talk about tap to pay and contactless pay. But when the pandemic happened, it became the standard and you saw the spike. But I think it's a combination of things. I think number one, people need social proof. They want to see others use it safely and then comment about it. You need the infrastructure. You have to believe that the infrastructure's there that actually gives you some confidence that this can work. You need ubiquitous distribution. And again, whether it's the ATMs, whether it's trusting strangers online with payments, even crypto, which is kind of in the midstream right now, it's all going through that same phase. Do I see the network effects? Do I see ubiquitous distribution? Do I see an infrastructure that gives me confidence? When you start to see that, then the behavior follows, then you get the social proof, and then I think you start to see a scale.

This AI-driven commerce, though, I think it's going to move very, very fast, because people are already using it and are not completely aware of it. So, they're tapping into Gemini when they now are searching in Google. They're not completely aware, but it's getting a direct answer. People are scrolling down less. People are using it for cross-border travel already. And so, it's helping people along the way and it's helping them do things that they otherwise could not do without it. And so, I think that to me is where you start to hit the tipping point, where the behavior change is better than the status quo.

Lance Glinn:

And can you just dive a little bit further into trust specifically when it comes to Visa? Because I feel like trust and Visa, those are two words that are kind of synonymous with one another. But how is Visa? With a technology like AI that is still relatively new to a certain extent. It's been around for a long time, but it really hit that wave, let's say late 2022, early 2023. How is Visa really maintaining that trust with anything AI related? Obviously, we're focusing on the B2AI study, but just with trust and Visa, how is that coming together?

Frank Cooper:

Well, look, I mean, Visa has been synonymous with trust because we've been synonymous with broad acceptance. So, anywhere you go, it will be accepted. You don't have to worry about that. So, carry your Visa credential with you and you know you're going to be taken care of. We've been synonymous with security. So, we will protect your identity. We'll protect your money with some of the best fraud protection software in the history of fraud protection software. We've been using AI for over 30 years in that effort. And we've been trusted because of zero liability. We make sure that the user has zero liability. I think those same things will apply in AI-driven commerce. But when you think about trust in general, people in all the studies of trust, whether it's Rachel Botsman, Who Can You Trust or you go back in time into the thousands and thousands of definitions of trust.

They all come down to three things. It's, does the person or company understand me? Are they capable? Do they have the capacity to actually solve the problem that I have? And then three, do they have integrity? Do they kind of walk the talk? And so, for us, we try to do all three things. Understand the consumers that we're serving and the customers that we're serving, continue to innovate and build capability and remain consistent. And I think that consistency is really important. One of the things that we've done recently, we've done a bunch of ads from everywhere you want to be and anthemic ads and highly emotional ads, and those are great. I love them. And we're going to continue to do it because I think it makes a difference.

But we really have been emphasizing the functional advantages of Visa. Most secure credential in the world, most accepted, zero liability. And I think reinforcing that, particularly in this time of AI-driven commerce, is going to be really important.

Lance Glinn:

And so, the B2AI study to me really paints this picture of a changing consumer landscape in real time. And obviously, we're seeing AI and its implementation and integration in businesses, and we're seeing business landscape change through it and business landscape of all sectors be disrupted. But to me, this paints a picture, like I said, of the changing consumer landscape. As Visa's CMO, how do you guide the organization through this rapid evolution? Things are popping up left and right, things are evolving, and you are one of the leaders that's in charge of making sure the organization continues and adapts along with them.

Frank Cooper:

I love this period of time because it's uncharted territory. No one's been here before. And so, I feel like we have two choices. We can sit and wait and react to what comes at us or we can try to shape the future. And so, for me, shaping the future takes you back to almost first principles. And so, if AI, an AI agent is a new customer segment, what would you do if for any customer segment anywhere in the world, the first thing you want to do is understand how that segment operates? And so, you start to reduce the sense of risk and certainly reduce the sense of uncertainty, simply by understanding how does it work. And so, we spend a lot of time thinking through how does a machine... how do you develop loyalty and preference from a machine? It just takes it down as a consumer segment.

But the thing that I want to make sure people don't lose sight of is that there's still a human connection to all of this. It's the human-AI sandwich in a way. And in the beginning, someone wants to do something, a person. And they're going to put in a prompt, they're going to put in some kind of request. They can put in a generic request if they want to. But if they have a preference or if they're loyal or they're advocates for a certain brand or a certain product, that prompt changes. And so, we can affect the prompt, we can affect the person upfront. But then at the end of it, so AI's going to deliver something, it's going to do its thing, computational, statistical predictions, and it will deliver a result. At the end of that result, there's a human being receiving that and responding to it.

Again, I think we have an opportunity to affect that. So, we have to win twice now. We have to win both with the humans and we have to win with the machines. And if we do that, I think, again, we won't have all the answers. But if we kind of look at it through that lens, at least we have a greater sense of control. But more importantly, we start to get data and deeper understanding of how this all operates. And because no one knows, we can start to shape some of that.

Lance Glinn:

And how do you do that with an LLM? That's such a challenging thing to do. Like you said, you have to win with the human, you have to win with the machine. I understand the science behind winning with the human. Visa's done that for decades. But winning with the machine, I mean, that's a whole new ballgame. Like you said, unchartered territory, no one's really done this before. So, what are the steps that need to be taken?

Frank Cooper:

Look, I mean, it's really understanding how the machine is programmed. And so, the pre-training piece of it, I think is really important. And what's fascinating to me is like, I love my engineering brethren, but I think they have a very narrow view of marketing. So, if you looked at the earlier versions of the training and the algorithm, it actually preferred reviews over company websites and company information. And that preference was really clear. You just plug it in, you could see how-

Lance Glinn:

And so, at that time you were driving to reviews, essentially?

Frank Cooper:

Exactly right. But then it became clear that actually the best source of information about a company and a product is often its website. Suddenly dot com becomes important again. And so, just understanding that kind of basic... just having that basic understanding of where it's sourcing its information, what it prioritizes, what it trusts, I think is really, really helpful. Secondly, it's having the appropriate APIs so that it's easy to access the information. But then I think the third layer is this, and this is where it gets a little more speculative. As you start to have agents speaking to agents and shaping the way they think. I think marketers in particular have to make a fundamental shift, and think less about trying to persuade and think more about how to provide fundamental information that can be trusted.

And for me, again, going back to the first principles, it's not about when people think of marketing, it's not about the next Super Bowl commercial, the next anthemic film, the next big experiential activation, all those sort of things. All those things are great. I love that, all those things. But for me, the fundamental quest of marketing within any firm is to drive profitable growth. And you do that by changing people's perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. And now that you have this fourth customer structuring it in a way that AI agents can read it and digest it and produce it in a way that's favorable to your firm.

Lance Glinn:

So, would you say that the goals of marketing have really stayed the same at the end of the day, but now how you market is changing?

Frank Cooper:

100%. 100%. Goals have not changed. Now, does the C-suite across every company and every enterprise see that in that way? I don't think so. I think what often happens is that people get locked into a formula or to muscle memories. So, you'll get some companies which will say we're all about performance marketing, which is a terrible term because all marketing should be performance based. But they're talking about bottom of the funnel, customer acquisition, minimize CAC, customer acquisition costs, and maximize lifetime value. Some of them lock into that and say, "That's what marketing is." Others lock into, "I need the big emotional kind of communication that people talk about." I think we all should lock into, do whatever it takes to drive profitable growth by changing people's perceptions, emotions, and behaviors.

Lance Glinn:

And so, Frank, before we pivot the conversation to some recent happenings with Visa, specifically around sports marketing, one last question on the study. When you just look at it holistically and you could take one or two or maybe even three, the biggest takeaways coming from it, what would you describe as the aha moments?

Frank Cooper:

The aha moment is that in order for AI-driven commerce to scale, in order for it to cross the chasm from these early adopters to the mainstream, we have to cross the trust threshold. That's the biggest takeaway. And the data kept coming back to us with this dynamic tension between an aspiration to dive into AI-driven commerce. And the fear that these agents, that they could be living in the matrix. And the agents suddenly take over, and you realize that you have no control over your agent, and they're spending your money in ways that you don't want to. And so, crossing that trust threshold for us is the most important takeaway.

And what I feel great about is that we have a playbook before that money tech growth adoption curve that we've seen before. And that playbook is build the infrastructure, give people the confidence that the distribution will be ubiquitous, build the security layer, and the trust layer in a way that people can rely upon it and then establish social proof. And on the marketing side, I think a lot of what we're going to be doing is really demonstrating the social proof. It's not so much of marketing features and benefits. It's showing that people believe in it, it's working for them, and they've had great outcomes in using it.

Lance Glinn:

All about crossing that trust threshold, as you said, and as we've talked about so far through a lot of our conversation. Now I do want to pivot our conversation, because there have been a pretty large number of global sporting events over the course of this year. You obviously had the Olympics, you have the World Cup coming up in a few months, you've had quite a few others. Obviously, the Super Bowl's on a yearly basis. We have the WBC. But there's a bunch of big sporting events. And now obviously, I know Visa has been a longtime supporter and partner with a lot of these different events.

And I want to start with the Olympics. It has been a worldwide Olympic partner since 1986, Visa has. That is a long time supporting really the world's biggest event and a world's biggest event that has produced some of the really iconic moments in all of sports. What does long-term investment mean in this specific event for Visa's brand identity and for the way the company shows up on this massive stage?

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. This year is phenomenal for us, because I think in the lunar calendar is the year of the horse. For Visa, it's the year of sponsorships. We have NFL Super Bowl. We just completed the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, and we have the FIFA Men's World Cup coming up. The Olympics is interesting, because a lot of. We've been there for 40 years, long-term partnership. If you think back, and they don't accept American Express, it was purely about an acceptance play, and it was really important. It was acceptance in global territories where the Olympics would touch down. Over time, we shifted that to more of a travel story, everywhere you want to be. And so, you started to see cross-border travel and how that participated in it. But the Olympics is special, because the Olympics allows us to be a part of the infrastructure building that comes along with the Olympics.

If you take the Winter Olympics in Milan, in Cortina, we've digitized thousands of small businesses. We've implemented EMV in several cities, so the chip technology on the card, we put that in. So, the infrastructure piece becomes a really important piece of it. And long-term brand equity and trust becomes an important part of it because it's not just a game. It has a cultural dimension to it, which I want to talk about, but it's also wrapped into national pride. It's wrapped into governments. It's wrapped into hopefully the long-term infrastructure of a city. And so, they're building stadiums, they're building properties, they're improving transit, and we can be a part of that. And the payment technology connected to that, I think is really important for us. So, it's a long-term brand play. It's also an infrastructure play for us.

Lance Glinn:

And you mentioned cultures, because you have hundreds of countries participating. And people around the world, billions of people around the world tuning into the different sports, hearing about athletes that they may have never heard before, watching sports that they may have never even seen before. And that's one of the beauties why I love the Olympics. I always say, I'm a big hockey fan. It was great watching US men's hockey win gold. But I love the sports that I never get to see, except every four years when the Olympics come on. But when you're a partner with an event as big as the Olympics and you have all these global audiences, how do you tailor or cater or really make sure your branding to not just us here in the United States, but those across the world?

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. We've done several things. So, one, we're very fortunate we operate in over 200 countries around the world. And we try to localize everything that we do. And the Olympics are included in that. If you look at, again, the Winter Olympics, this recent Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, we did ads with Intesa. Actually, an AI produced ad within Intesa, showing skiers coming through an Italian village. We created a original track with Italian producers and Italian singers. We were on the ground working with small businesses across Italy, actually, but certainly in Milano Cortina. And so, one, we try to localize what we do.

The second thing is we focus less on the Olympics. We focus less on the individual sports and we tend to construct a team of athletes that we call Team Visa. And so, we'll have Mikaela Shiffrin or Oksana Masters. In the summer games, we'll have Noah Lyles. And we'll have over 100 athletes on the Summer Olympics.

Lance Glinn:

Are these athletes from a bunch of different countries?

Frank Cooper:

For a bunch of different countries. We have pretty much parody, female, male. And we have a large percentage of them are Paralympic athletes. And so, we try to have that mix. And then different parts of the world, we use different athletes for different communications, but we also bring them together. And for me, that's the cultural dimension. Because people hear the stories of the athletes, and I think NBC and other channels do a great job of telling those stories. But the social part of it, the fandom piece, like how do you get closer to these athletes, we feel like that's been a missing link. And so, we've really tuned into this idea of fandom. And how do you unlock that fandom so they have not only access, but an understanding of what motivates these athletes, and the process that they go through, and the trials, and tribulations and aspirations and fears that they have? And so, we try to unlock that piece of it as well.

Lance Glinn:

And I want to dive more into sort of that fandom a little bit later in our conversation with another partnership we're going to talk about. But before we get there, LA28 is a real landmark moment because it'll be the first time the Olympics is back in the United States since I think 2002, the Salt Lake City games. So, with such a significant opportunity to expand domestic influence and brand awareness, how is Visa already preparing? And we're two years out or a year and a half, whatever it might be. I don't know the exact number. But we're about two years out to really capitalize on the scale and the visibility, both domestically and abroad of what LA28 is going to bring.

Frank Cooper:

I'm so excited about LA28. I live in the US. They'll probably say I have a US bias, but I think this will be one of the most remarkable Olympics that we've seen. Now, the Paris Olympics, before that was the most remarkable Olympics that we've seen. And the reason it's remarkable is that culture and commerce came together in a way that was seamless. And you're watching volleyball in front of the Eiffel Tower and people say, "Well, that's an amazing experience in and itself." I think LA has the potential to surpass it because it's probably going to be, I believe, the most commercially-oriented Olympics that we've seen. What they're offering to sponsors, the pathways in which we can actually connect with athletes, but also give consumers greater access, we have not seen before. So, what we're doing now is we're trying to design the experiences that we think will be meaningful to consumers, trying to give them special access. But we're more importantly, outside of the games, developing experiences and content that we think will be important for fans of the Olympics and for fans of specific athletes.

Lance Glinn:

And just overall, when you look at the Olympics, then we're going to get to the World Cup, but when you just look at the Olympics, how do you and your team just think about developing campaigns and innovations that really feel true to Visa's identity, while also resonating to that worldwide audience? Because like we talked about before, you're not just advertising and branding to us here in the US. There's hundreds of companies that participate in the Olympics. You talked about localization. But with so many different expectations and with so many different cultures you have to advertise and brand to, how do you really develop those campaigns innovations to make that happen?

Frank Cooper:

It's a great question. We try to think about in the layers. And so, the most foundational layers, what's a human truth that we think applies across every region, across every culture? And at the core of that, in our brand positioning, is this idea that people really want to become the person that they want to be. And it's not like it used to be. Your pathway, if you go back in time, your pathway was laid out for you. You want to be an apprentice to be a blacksmith, that's what you do. Your path is laid out and you're that for the rest of your life. It is likely that people growing up today, coming into a career, will probably move to at least three or four industries. Will have a minimum of six different jobs. Minimum, six different jobs. Will probably have a side hustle, a gig on the side. Maybe a secret creator, maybe that pops with them, maybe it doesn't. And maybe they make a little bit of money out of it, but they're all trying to fashion the person that they want to be.

And so, that fundamental need, we think, is at the core of our brand. And what's beautiful about it is that if you look at transactions, you can think about that in pure economic terms. But if you take a step back, every transaction, that swipe, tap or click, in some way is you're becoming the person you want to be. If you're swiping on the transit and you're coming into work, you're coming down to the New York Stock Exchange, that is all part of that. And if you collected all the receipts over time, it's like a scrapbook of who you want to be. And so, on the most fundamental level, we tell that story. And if you look at the most recent spots we did with Oksana or Mikaela, it's that story.

And they all tell it in the very same way, which is it's not one big leap. It's not a eureka moment. There's no epiphany. It's a process of small steps and getting better every day. And so, that's on the most foundational layer. Then we try to adapt that for individual territories, but then we get to the functional advantages. And we never leave out the functional advantages of security, acceptance, and convenience. And so, that becomes the portfolio of assets and communications that we try to present when we're in the Olympics.

Lance Glinn:

And now to the World Cup, Visa has been a global partner of the World Cup for nearly two decades. And obviously, it's a partnership that is very visible. It's one that resonates. The World Cup, like the Olympics, is watched by millions of people around the world. How has Visa's involvement with the World Cup shaped the way the brand connects with fans across borders, across cultures and traditions? As we talked about with the Olympics, so many different countries watching. You talked about localization, you talked about the journey just now. But with the World Cup, specifically when it's not a bunch of different sports or a bunch of different athletes that are playing different sports. It's literally all these different athletes playing this one singular sport going for that one title. So, how do you then focus and develop brands or campaigns across this global game?

Frank Cooper:

It took me a while to understand football, real football. And before coming to Visa, I was at another company. We signed a bunch of athletes who were attached to football. And so, I saw it from that angle. Visa has been with FIFA for over two decades. But the thing I've learned over time is that the fandom within football is unrivaled. There's nothing like it that I've ever seen. And then so, if you try to break down the fandom and you ask, so where's the attachment? On the World Cup, the attachment is on a national level. Generations have been connected to a team. And sometimes they're not even from that country. You might love Argentina or Brazil and not be from Argentina or Brazil, but generations are attached to it. Then it's on the athlete level. There's certain athletes that just capture the imagination of people across the board, whether that's Mbappé or Lamine Yamal or others or Messi, of course, over a long period of time.

And so, what we try to do is really understand what the fan wants and what are some of the unmet needs of the fans. And so, we create fan experiences. We have a bunch of promotions. We'll bring fans down to the pitch, so they'll go there before the game and they'll watch the warmups. We create special content, where you can see an athlete that the fan may love practice and see the routine or see them off the pitch in a way that you may not otherwise see them. We're trying to create these fan experiences. We put them in situations that may be unfamiliar. Something like we did with some F1 drivers, Liam and Isaac. We brought them into a Visa office, and what would it be like if they were employees of the office for the day?

And so, we're just trying to entertain, connect and build community around fans in ways that we think fulfill their unmet needs. And so, that's been our approach to it overall. And there's nothing like FIFA and football to do it. In FIFA Men's World Cup in North America, we're going to have 104 games, 48 teams across 16 cities. We think we'll get somewhere between five billion to six billion viewers on the final. It'll be well-

Lance Glinn:

The final, that's not going to be far from where we're sitting right now.

Frank Cooper:

It'd be right across the way.

Lance Glinn:

Right at MedLife.

Frank Cooper:

Right at MedLife. And I'm super excited about that. And that'll get over a billion and a half viewers in the final itself. And so, if you put it in NFL terms, it's like 18 Super Bowls happening in a condensed period of what? Two, three weeks? And so, for us, we're very excited about that piece of it also. And we leverage that in a bunch of different ways. I've talked about consumer. We leverage it with clients. And so, we build campaigns for clients. We leverage it because there's consumer revenue. There's going to be cross-border travel around that. There are going to be a bunch of transactions. We leverage it by enabling and digitizing small businesses so they can actually get in on the game also and take advantage of it. And so, there are multiple layers to it.

And that's why I love these global sports platforms, where you have the highly engaged people at scale, participating simultaneously. That is rare today. If you have all those elements coming together, it's rare. And so, we're excited about this opportunity.

Lance Glinn:

And so, more of a inside baseball type of question. When you think about or when you have these on the calendar, and obviously these are on the calendar years and years out. We know where the Olympics are going to be even past 2028. So, you have time to prepare. When does that preparation start? Whether it be for the Olympics, whether it be for the World Cup. Obviously, we talked LA 2028 is about two years away. The World Cup's only a couple months away, but when does the preparation start? When do you move past Milan, Cortina, to look to LA28? When do you move past the previous World Cup to look to this one?

How do you sort of budget your time or your team's time to make sure that you are focused on the next thing? Because you said the Paris games in 2024 were the most remarkable summer games, but 2028's going to be even more remarkable. So, you want to make sure you're ready for that even more remarkable moment.

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. It's almost immediate. We'll take a short break, but there's a dedicated team on the Olympics. There's a dedicated team on the FIFA World Cup, both men's and women's. And it's literally short break afterwards and we start right away, because we have to build the Team Visa component. So, which athletes do we want? We have to secure venues for experiences. We're securing out of home placements. And so, that requires a couple of years in advance, actually, in order for you to do it. And again, I think LA28 will be one of the most commercially intense Olympics that we've ever seen. And so, the competition for space and the competition for attention, I think will be equally intense. And so, we actually plan well in advance because the cycles are long, but you have to acquire the infrastructure first in order to deliver the messaging.

And so, there really are no breaks on it. And yes, the Olympics happens every four years. If you look at it from the perspective of summer or winter alone, but happens every two years. I think our opportunity is to find more connective tissue across these global properties. And that's one of the things we're trying to do. FIFA presents that opportunity a bit because FIFA Men's World Cup will be in LA. LA28, the Summer Olympics will be in LA. And so, we think there's a unique opportunity there where you have both-

Lance Glinn:

Bring them both together?

Frank Cooper:

Exactly right. Yeah.

Lance Glinn:

And so, we go from the Olympics and global football to American football, on which you can also consider a global game because they play so many games now across the world. So, you consider that to a certain extent a global game too. But in March, Visa's 30-year partnership with the NFL ended. But the company, as you mentioned, did not, or as you mentioned in previous interviews, did not exit the league entirely. As you think about collaborations ahead with domestically the biggest sporting game there is or the biggest sport there is, what does this next era for Visa and its presence during the football season look like?

Frank Cooper:

So, we loved the NFL partnership and have a enormous respect for the league, for what Roger Goodell and team have done with the league is a phenomenal story. And we cherish that relationship and look fondly on the relationship that we had for quite some time. When we look at it through the fan lens and you think about what does a fan want and need in American football, what we see is that, first and foremost, they're attached to a team. Secondly, they're attached to players. And then the media distribution, the context then matters. And so, those are the top three things. And so, the question we asked ourselves is what could we construct by having more teams, more players, and personalities, and thinking of media in a much broader way. And we feel really good about our opportunities there. We are going to be very involved in the NFL.

And we think those three layers give us a unique opportunity to go even deeper, to drive fan engagement, to drive client revenue, to generate more consumer revenue. And so, we're very excited about that. We're in the process of doing that now. I believe the deal just ended at the end of February or maybe the end of March. So, we're now moving into the next phase. And so, you'll start to hear a series of announcements, team signings, celebrity signings, existing player signings, and then media partnerships.

Lance Glinn:

And that all points too, like with the Olympics, which you talked about, like with the World Cup, which we talked about, that's sort of more localization, that looking at something broad where you have the NFL, you could do a partnership with the broader NFL, but that's just the league as a whole. When you look towards a more segmented group, fans of a specific team, fans of a specific player, that allows you to sort of become more local and, I guess, create events or create innovations or experiences that relate more to the fan of the team, rather than a fan of just the league. Because there really aren't just fans of the league. Like you said, I'm a New York Giants fan. I'm not necessarily an NFL fan. I'm a Giants fan.

Frank Cooper:

That's right. That's right. I lose the shield, but I have the thing that the fans care about the most.

Lance Glinn:

But you have the logo. You have the team logo.

Frank Cooper:

I have the team logo, the team colors, the team merch. I have the team players, both historical players and current players. I feel really good about that portfolio of assets. And so, for us, I think it allows us to be both hyper local, but also to ladder up. And so, if you think about this as a portfolio of assets, you can go deep on the Baltimore Ravens, and great team, great stadium, great program, great history. Fan base is so intense. If you're a Ravens fan, you are all in. And so, that's great, but I can also ladder up. Lamar is interesting beyond the Baltimore Ravens. And so, you can take personalities like that, combine them with other personalities or put them in another context, and suddenly you have greater reach. And so, I love the modularity of it. So, you can play with it in a hyper local way, but you can also take it up, make it at least national and maybe global.

Lance Glinn:

And as a Giants fan, they have a great former coach that I'm now happy is the current coach of my New York Giants. But Frank, when you look just five or 10 years down the road, thinking about sports in general and sports marketing and these partnerships, what do you think the biggest shift will be in how Visa shows up in the world of sports and entertainment? Is it that hyper localization? Is it that more segmented groups or is it something different?

Frank Cooper:

The most fundamental shift for us that we've been making, and I hope this is solidified in the next five years, is we're moving from this idea of being a traditional sponsor, where we are adjacent to the property, seeking a halo effect from the property, and we're viewed as endemic to the sport, endemic to the property. And so, we're contributing in ways that people feel like, yes, Visa's not a sponsor, Visa's part of it. We're creating original IP, original intellectual property that people respect and want and expect. And so, for us, that's the main shift. It's really becoming less of a sponsor brand and more of a creator brand within each of these sports.

Lance Glinn:

So, to end our conversation, I want to zoom back out to where we started with the B2AI study. When you think about everything learned from the research, even everything that we've talked about over the course of this 30, 35 plus minutes, what's your view of where just AI is taking commerce, AI is taking partnership and how the study will really move things forward in these respects?

Frank Cooper:

Yeah. Again, I think the study for me just really highlights that in the world of payments, brand really matters. And brand really matters because you have to cross a trust threshold. And so, how are you going to really identify whom to trust? And I believe that the brands that people feel like protect their identity, protect their liability, give them a sense of control. The ones that have been there in that way over a long period of time, they're symbols of trust that become even more important. And so, in this AI-driven world, what the study for me shines a light on is that the scarce commodity is going to be trust. And that the brands that actually stand for trust have a unique advantage in this period, where we're going to see the adoption curve pick up and we move from that early adopter to the early mainstream.

Lance Glinn:

Well, Frank, this has been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed speaking with you. Thanks so much for coming Inside the ICE House.

Frank Cooper:

Thanks, Lance. It's been great.