> Needless to say they lost the sale. How many other sales did they lose I wonder?
Surely not enough to cover the massive amount of money Visa paid to be an exclusive sponsor. In London this year that is reportedly over $100M and during the first week Visa racked up $700 million worth of charges at the games.
Interesting. What you're implying is that the marketing benefits of Visa become a sponsor are secondary to the direct revenue it generates at the event.
This could be the most profitable marketing spend with the quickest ROI ever.
"$700 million worth of charges" Visa only gets 2-5% of the charge. Lets assume on the high end at 5% we are talking about only 35 million in income. Even doubling that for the second week we get 70 million (before costs). How is that the quickest ROI ever? Sounds like a bad marketing move backed up by a loss of profits. Maybe the real winners were the olympic committee or the other credit card companies that bid up the price against Visa.
Visa's in it for the interest payments. For every consumer that doesn't pay their bill in full each month ... they've got months and/or years of interest piled on top of paying back whatever they spent.
No, I'm saying that any lost sales the IOC sees from people who don't have cash or Visa will be more than made up by the huge amount of cash Visa paid to be a sponsor. The $700m figure just shows that the exclusive relationship is doing just fine.
More likely, in my mind: The IOC gets the marketing money from Visa, while the independent vendors at the Olympics take the hit from not being able to accept MasterCard.
Moreover, the terms the independent vendors get are likely extremely onerous, such that they are likely the ones shafted with inventory for items that don't sell.
The IOC gets the money coming and going. Which is good to support, you know, amateur athletics.
Surely not enough to cover the massive amount of money Visa paid to be an exclusive sponsor. In London this year that is reportedly over $100M and during the first week Visa racked up $700 million worth of charges at the games.