Grand Ex 2025: Visa and Imagination Earn the Campaign of the Year with ‘Live at Le Louvre’ -

Visa artfully blends heritage and innovation with an Olympics-sized sponsorship and cultural coup

The brief was, well, brief: “Get the world talking about Visa.”

What ensued was the biggest owned cultural moment in brand history.

It all began with an elaborate vision to deliver a live music experience that stood in a class of its own. So as Paris was preparing to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Visa’s event marketing team was plotting a groundbreaking sponsorship activation that would transform a historic art institution into a concert venue—and the brand into a global conversation piece.

Armed with a diverse lineup of musicians that included headliner Post Malone along with Ayra Starr, RaiNao and DJ Kungs, a one-of-a-kind location, and roughly five months to achieve the “impossible,” the brand and lead agency Imagination ultimately delivered an engagement and engineering masterpiece that blended art, music and tech, and connected millions of Gen Z fans IRL, on social and on Roblox. Welcome to Visa Live at Le Louvre.

The centerpiece of the campaign was an iconic venue. To create widespread cultural impact, the location of the activation was just as important as the event experience itself. Following weeks of back-and- forth communications, the brand secured Musée du Louvre, one of the world’s most distinguished art museums, as its arena. It was the first time the Louvre hosted a live concert, and the first time Visa produced an original music IP experience. And the whole world was watching.

C’EST L’AMOUR

Forging a partnership with an iconic art institution that’s dripping in legacy and home to an endless array of priceless artworks was no modest undertaking. In fact, Visa was told time and again that hosting a live music event at the Louvre was downright impossible. But instead of serving as a deterrent, the naysaying inspired the brand to double down on its efforts. Live at Le Louvre was not only designed to cultivate brand love on a global stage, but to serve as a launchpad for a comprehensive new Visa Live music strategy—and backing down wasn’t an option.

“We started by writing a love letter to the president of the Louvre,” Jenny Stahl Cobler, vp-global experiential and entertainment marketing at Visa, told an audience at the Experiential Marketing Summit in Las Vegas in April. “I know that sounds crazy, but we wrote a love letter outlining our intention, our ambition, and how this was going to be so beneficial for both the Louvre Museum and Visa… We courted them for months. I can’t even tell you the calls, the trips we made to Paris. But we wore them down, and they finally said ‘yes.’”

Challenging as it was, securing the museum partnership was just the first hurdle. The obstacles that followed were more akin to “The Da Vinci Code.”

PYRAMID SCHEMES

With the Louvre’s Cour Carrée, a courtyard that sits behind the museum’s famous glass Pyramid, selected as its location, Visa was faced with the paradox of executing a big, bold show without disturbing the site’s fragile artifacts and architecture. According to Stahl Cobler, the million-dollar question was: “How are we going to take a non-concert venue and turn it into this incredible stage?”

Preserving the museum’s heritage and integrity was a significant priority. The Cour Carrée was built on the foundations of Napoleon’s castle, and sits atop the venue’s underground archives, which protect thousands of invaluable relics (including a mummy). Under the circumstances, the Louvre played a critical part in the planning process.

“For obvious reasons, the Louvre Museum doesn’t host events, especially amplified sound events, because they are so precious about the artwork,” Stahl Cobler explained. “They actually gave the team and our head sound engineer a tour of what was at stake. And I can honestly say that throughout this process, getting the contract done with the Louvre Museum, an institution steeped in tradition that’s not necessarily forward-thinking, was probably the largest and most challenging thing I’ve ever done, professionally.”

“We set out to carve out a space within the world of music that would become synonymous with Visa.”

–Jenny Stahl Cobler, VP-Global Experiential and Entertainment Marketing, Visa

THE BALANCE BEAM

As they do, particularly when it comes to 232-year-old venues, the obstacles kept coming. Weight restrictions at the site made the load-in process for the performance stage particularly challenging. Visa was tasked with pulling off an immense engineering job that required implementing a Jamboree roof and redesigning aspects of the stage to reduce its weight. Making matters more complicated, the brand was restricted from replacing the courtyard’s cobblestones.

The threat of vibration-induced damage to the Louvre’s buildings and artworks also had to be addressed to ensure that Visa could raise the decibels of its show to concert levels without harming the surrounding environment. So the brand’s engineers tested various noise frequencies alongside the museum’s curators to understand which pieces were most at risk, then developed a noise management plan to tailor frequency levels using directional audio and state-of-the-art sound-monitoring tech.

SOCIAL CUES

Visa strategically aligned the sponsorship campaign’s visual identity with that of the Louvre in collaboration with local French digital artist Vincent Viriot, who designed individual busts with modern twists of each performer in the lineup. The designs were then leveraged to develop the aesthetic of the campaign at large, right down to the stage programming and sets.

The branding additionally fueled a robust social media strategy that included 28 influencer partners and 172 pieces of content, which catapulted Visa past its initial targets and became the largest scale of social content it has ever commissioned.

“We really wanted to collaborate closely, giving [creators] unprecedented access to tell their story in their own voice and style,” said Jiri Bures, executive creative director at Imagination. “So we gave them behind-the-scenes talent interactions and exclusive event moments, enabling them to generate a wide range of content… That really hit the mark with our audience and ultimately led to a lift of over 6 percent. So it’s safe to say that Visa owned Live at Le Louvre across every channel.”

GAME ON

Visa’s ability to reach Gen Z and young millennials through its Roblox livestream of the concert was instrumental to the suc- cess of the sponsorship. By bringing talent that had global appeal to one of the world’s most popular gaming platforms, the brand not only vastly expanded the scope of its programming, but met audiences where they were, and in doing so, showcased its commitment to a core value among younger demos—inclusivity.

In addition to the Roblox concert, Visa crafted a virtual Louvre Experience available throughout the summer that provided users with a chance to observe some of the museum’s most celebrated pieces, and win Louvre-inspired digital objects.

Continuing the art theme, the brand also took cues from Parisian street market culture to create The Artist Square, a virtual pop-up where any Roblox user could craft visual art, put it on display and even sell it as a digital item.

CLOSING CEREMONIES

By all accounts, Visa bucked the norms of a standard sponsorship in favor of crafting an owned cultural moment that provided unprecedented access, demonstrated inclusivity, showcased technical prowess, and captured hearts and minds worldwide in a way that few other brands, if any, could.

All told, Visa Live at Le Louvre garnered 9.3 million social impressions, engaged 4,600 fans on-site, attracted 1.1 million users to the Roblox livestream, earned 77 unique media articles and increased relevancy among Gen Z and young millennials by 6 percent.

What began as a campaign that outsiders deemed too grandiose to pull off concluded with a massive victory lap. In fact, it was the sheer magnitude of the brand’s leap of faith that yielded the program’s Olympics-sized results. And that was the whole point.

As Stahl Cobler put it: “Always disrupt first, ask questions later, because as everyone knows, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission.”

Photos: Courtesy of Visa