Visa brings back Everywhere you want to be

An old line for a new kind of company

On 13 January 2014, Visa launched "Everywhere you want to be", a communications platform built on the tagline that had closed its American advertising from 1985 to 2006.^1,2 Visa described it as a multi-stakeholder platform: one message for consumers, merchants, governments, financial institutions and its own employees, told to each audience in its own terms. It came with a refreshed logo and a new visual identity, and its first television spot, "Flying", began airing in the United States the same day.¹ In the logo, the orange flick gave way to a solid blue gradient.³

The words had barely changed. Visa dropped the "It's" from the original line and retired "More people go with Visa", the slogan it had used since 2009.² In the eight years between, the brand had spoken in other voices. "Life takes Visa" had been its American slogan for several years before 2009.⁴ The "Go" platform that followed, created by TBWA and voiced by Morgan Freeman,⁵ was what Visa called its first global advertising campaign.⁶

The agency and the line return together

The line came back with the agency that had written it. BBDO New York had created "It's everywhere you want to be" in 1985, lost the account to TBWA in the run-up to the 2006 Winter Games, and was named creative lead again in 2012.⁷ "Flying" was the first major Visa work from BBDO New York since 2005.² Andrew Robertson, president and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, said the new theme "does not represent a reset or a restart."²

That framing mattered for the brand. A new slogan has to earn its recognition. A returning one arrives with it, and with the meaning two decades of advertising had built around it. Visa could signal change while sounding familiar. Antonio Lucio, the company's chief brand officer, said that Visa had been reassessing its position under its new chief executive, Charles W. Scharf, and had found "areas where we need to do better."² The old line gave that reassessment a surface customers already knew.

Heritage as a stated strategy

Visa did not present the revival as nostalgia. It presented it as a choice about its past. Lucio said that "connecting to our heritage and vision was a powerful and irresistible idea," and the platform was anchored in the company's vision of being the "best way to pay and be paid."¹ He added: "The new platform is compelling because it encompasses strengths of Visa, past, present and future."¹

The heritage was half of the argument. The other half was a new reading of the central word. "We recognized that, for the first time in Visa's 55-year history 'everywhere' is now within reach of 'everyone,'" Lucio said.¹ In the 1980s "everywhere" had been a claim about acceptance, told through places that took Visa and not its rivals.⁷ In 2014 Visa tied it to mobile and ecommerce payments that reached new people and places, and gave three examples: a farmer in Rwanda paying school fees by phone, a jewellery designer in California selling to customers around the world online, and a government official in Brazil rebuilding a village with a Visa prepaid card.¹ The same words now described inclusion rather than destinations.

Flying as the first proof

The first spot made that reading personal. "Flying" starred Sarah Hendrickson, a Team Visa athlete and American ski jumper, and marked the debut of women's ski jumping at the Olympic Winter Games.⁸ A recording Amelia Earhart made in the 1930s ran beneath the pictures,⁹ and Hendrickson herself spoke the line that carried the idea: "Now, women get a chance to fly."² The spot invited viewers to picture their own "everywhere".⁸ The tagline no longer pointed to a restaurant or a ski resort. It pointed to a moment of access that had not existed before.

"We will express our vision to each of our audiences in ways that are directly meaningful to them," Lucio said.¹ For a network whose customers range from cardholders to banks and governments, a single line elastic enough to cover all of them was the practical gain.

What reclaiming the line did

Reclaiming a retired claim also reframes what came between. "Life takes Visa" and "Go" had moved the brand into daily spending and onto a global stage. The returning line kept those shifts and put them under a name people already associated with Visa. The line also stays open to play. In September 2025 Visa extends it with "And some places you don't", which it describes as "an opportunity to modernize while honoring the original."⁷

By bringing the line back, Visa turned an old slogan into a piece of brand property. What had been a sign-off in American television became a corporate statement for every audience the company had, and a phrase the brand could still return to more than a decade later.