Today we have a guest post from none other than my own brother, Mike Seaver...no, not that Mike Seaver...my brother Mike Seaver. Anyway, he's on the pastoral staff at Crossway Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, but he sent me the following post because he was an advertising major in college and still gets a burn on about media and marketing from time to time. He's got a take on Visa's Olympic commercials that I thought was worth sharing here. It's not specific about social media...it's more about branding and Visa's campaign in general.
My wife and I love watching the Olympics and even enjoy the creative commercials. Many are funny and some are inspiring. I find myself now exercising with the thought of ìI wonder if I could do that.î The answer is of course, no, but it is fun to wonder.
The Beijing Olympics have provided a series of commercials from Visa that are both enjoyable and annoying. They're enjoyable because they have the voice of Morgan Freeman and the images of many athletes performing marvelous feats. They're annoying because each of them ends with ìGO WORLD.î
The first time I saw that I said, ìWhat, GO WORLDÖwhat the heck does that mean?î Can we not pull for a team or country enough to say in the United States, ìGO USA.î We have to be so inclusive and non-offensive that we say ìGO WORLD.î If I went to a local Carolina Panthers game and stood up and started saying ìGO NFLÖyou go National Football League players,î everyone would know I was an idiot. You pull for one team or the other, you donít pull for all of the teams equally. Why in the world do we have the Olympics if we are pulling for everyone equally at the same time? That undermines everything the Olympics stands for.
A few years ago I was in Brazil during the World Cup. I appreciated the trash talk from the Brazilians. They were not saying, ìGO USA,î they were telling me how bad we were going to get beat. It was fun. It was sports. HelloÖthis is what competition is all about.
So, if Visa is going to be one of these ìevery player gets a trophyî type of companies and canít have the guts to say ìGO USAî in the USA, I say ìGO AWAY,î but let us keep Morgan FreemanÖhe has a cool voice.