Shiv Singh
Visa’s Shiv Singh: This Year,
Brands Will Learn How to Measure
Real-Time Marketing
Shiv Singh’s role at Visa is twofold: to manage global brand strategy and positioning, but also to evolve the way Visa does
marketing. Singh spoke with eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson about Visa’s attitude toward real-time marketing and how the
company plans to measure the performance of real-time initiatives
eMarketer: Real-time marketing may be one of the biggest disruptors that brands face right now. The idea that you
need to be agile and responsive and move quickly and use data and respond rapidly is something many companies are
confronting. How do you approach it at Visa?
Shiv Singh:
Real-time marketing is a phrase that has, I think, 100 definitions. Unfortunately, a lot of brands are
losing sight of what the heart and soul and DNA of their brand is. They’re letting the real-time marketing craze just drive
everything and anything they do.
From our perspective at Visa, we have very strong brand positioning, very strong brand strategy. Anything and everything
we do needs to build our brand and drive our geography marketing and business objectives. And if it doesn’t, we don’t
feel the need to do real-time marketing for the sake of real-time marketing.
eMarketer: In what types of scenarios does real-time marketing make sense for Visa?
Singh: When we think about real-time marketing, we think of a few things. One is much sharper, much tighter insights
about our consumers. We want to find that intersection between what’s happening in real-time culture—what our
consumer interests and desires are—and what our brand purpose and meaning is.
One of the things that we’re pushing is connecting social insights with pop culture and with content, not just in social, but
across all channels and mediums. We also want to connect social insights with media planning and buying, not just in
social but [again] across all channels