To get foodies across New Zealand excited about ‘Wellington On a Plate’ food festival, we needed to do something to cut through all the food videos and photos cluttering their social feeds.

So, we created an experience worth sharing.

We made a video you could taste. With Visa Welly Beans.

We dissected a festival-inspired burger and cocktail and transformed the flavours into jelly bean form. Then we created a taste-along video, and shared the experience with foodie influencers.

The taste-along video visually had you salivating as our Welly Bean flavours gave you a real taste of what you were seeing.

It was a visual tasting experience like no other and one worth sharing. And the influencers did. Reaching hundreds of thousands on social media, and gaining national television coverage.

To get the Welly Beans into the hands of foodie influencers, we delivered the Visa Welly Beans to them in a premium tasting box, with a link to the online taste-along video.

Inside the Visa Welly Beans box, they would find four flavours laid out in a tasting flight: Parmesan Cheese, Chipotle-infused Wagyu Beef, Micro-beetroot, and ‘Gorse’-tini cocktail. An insert card detailed the flavours, highlighting the locally-sourced produce and ingredients from suppliers of the festival. 

More details about the Visa Wellington On a Plate food festival were woven into the taste-along video.

Hundreds of Visa Welly Beans packs were distributed ahead of the Visa Pre-sale, where foodies could buy festival tickets to exclusive events via Visa Checkout.

In line with Visa’s desire to tangibly support the festival beyond passive naming rights, the focus for this campaign on driving out of town awareness and visitation resulted in a 15% YOY increase in the volume of tickets sold, 5 percentage points higher than the target.

In an increasingly fragmented payments landscape establishing relevancy with millennials has been a core focus for Visa throughout this campaign activity. Results showed that Visa’s reputation as an innovative brand surpassed its target by 2% within its key millennial target audience increasing their association with “Visa is a leader in innovative payment solutions” during pre and post campaign surveying.

Of the 142 diners at the night market activation, a further 147k people were able to see the video experience via social media, and the Visa Welly Beans pack recipients resulted in a further reach of 135k thanks to them sharing their experience online.