Did Visa Lose Sight of Ball in NFL Sponsorship?

It’s football season again — for Visa Inc., that is.

Visa this week signed on to sponsor the NFL for another four years, which entitles us to engage in that age-old tradition called Monday morning quarterbacking.

The question is, was the deal worth it? Firstly, it should be mentioned that neither Visa nor the NFL released terms of the deal, so it’s extremely difficult to gauge whether Visa got a good deal.

Visa receives three benefits as part of its sponsorship package through 2014:

1) The right to be the exclusive payment service for the NFL and all official NFL events through the 2014 season;

2) Top-tier sponsorship of the NFL Draft and NFL Kickoff;

3) Exclusive experiences for Visa clients to utilize in their Visa card marketing programs;

4) A Visa and NFL co-branded online portal on NFL.com for Visa Signature cardholders to obtain access to one-of-a-kind NFL experiences; and

5) Expanded presence and preference for NFL-related transactions through various sales channels.

Being the exclusive payment service matters. The NFL sold about $3.5 billion of just merchandise last year, so ostensibly that alone could be worth $70 million to Visa, which is part owned by the banks that issue the cards. As Craig Lambert, principal of The Lambert Group, a digital media consultancy, and a long-time advertising executive, put it: “It’s better than buying the naming rights to a stadium.”

“Some of that will drop to the bottom line,” Lambert said, which means the deal is “possibly better than your average media deal.”

Lambert was less enthusiastic about the traditional sponsorship elements of the agreement. While sponsoring the NFL Draft and NFL Kickoff are “low-cost ways [for Visa] to get tags and badges without a media buy,” he wondered whether Visa actually needed the exposure.

“Do they need more awareness when they have 100% awareness already?” he asked.

Good question.

As Lambert pointed out, the web elements of the deal will ultimately depend on the web experience, so again it is tough to gauge the benefit to Visa of those aspects of the agreement. Here’s the rule of thumb, according to Lambert: “If the experience moves people to use Visa cards when they wouldn’t otherwise have, then it is worth it.”

That’s a big “if.”