Contactless is a payment solution that enables cardholders to pay simply and quickly by tapping their debit/credit card to a reader without entering a PIN. You can pay in seconds for anything under £20 in the UK.

Despite high volumes of cards in market and high penetration of retail terminals, overall activation and on-going card usage was low.

We wanted to drive habitual usage of contactless. But how do you get consumers who have been paying with chip and PIN for years and haven’t responded to the rational benefits of speed and ease to give it a try?

To normalise contactless payments we launched the ‘Everyday Britons are paying with Visa contactless’ campaign in February 2015. We ran six executions across outdoor (national and proximity to retail outlets) supported with press, radio and online advertising.

Results to date have been outstanding driving both activation and ongoing usage.

We wanted to motivate our target audience to act by communicating that ‘Everyday Britons’ are paying with Visa Contactless. These ‘Everyday Britons’ celebrate the diversity of the UK population whilst depicting people you may be surprised to learn are paying with contactless – even a fisherman, even an antiques dealer, even a judge… Ultimately communicating that contactless is now the normal way to pay and transforming behaviour to trial and use contactless.

We worked with award winning photographer Alex Telfer and produced striking portrait photography where each execution featured one subject looking directly into the camera. These characters were interesting, characterful, their image tell us a richer story, a recognition and a celebration of real Britain today.

Since the campaign launched in February 2015 we have seen:

• a 16% increase in card activations

• a 29% increase in transactions

• an increase of 10% in average number of transactions per customer.*

• over £750m has been spent on Visa contactless cards over February and March.

For the National promotion we received 68,452 entries (unique = 13,596)