Saatchi & Saatchi creates Visa Rio 2016 Olympics campaign

Saatchi & Saatchi has designed Visa’s Rio 2016 Olympics campaign, basing the imagery around the idea of a heart. Gordon Reid, a designer who worked on the campaign, says: “We used a metaphor of a heart to show that the Olympics and Visa are always ‘on,’ like a heart. Each piece of the artwork demonstrates this in a different way, so we’ve got the heart of the athlete, the heart of Rio, the heart of the fan and the main key visual, the heart of the Olympics.”

The campaign, which took around six months to deliver, comprises five images in total, which were created using a mixture of 3D rendered illustrations and photography shot with agency Smoke and Mirrors. “That’s where my role changed from being a designer to an art director and a project manager,” says Gordon. “I was working with the head of design Bruno di Lucca, and we were working on everything from briefing the production agencies to making sure every country got the files properly. You end up with all the fun questions you don’t usually have to deal with as a designer.”

The film for the campaign was created by Saatchi & Saatchi Ben Robinson and Mike Whiteside and directed by Juan Cabral. According to the agency, it “follows an athlete preparing to compete and depicts the journey he goes through in the build up to the ultimate moment; the competition. His everyday life is interspersed with images of a beating heart, drawing parallels between the heart of an athlete and Visa.”

The print images and video are shown across all channels including billboards, posters, print and online banners. There is also a dedicated Visa Rio Olympics microsite.