Letters

Vis-a-vis Visa
Allow me to offer insight on the history of the Visa account, mentioned in the article “Storming the Citadel” [News Analysis, Oct. 5].
As the last creative director for Visa’s in-house agency, my final assignment was to brief the agencies invited to pitch the account (when senior marketing management decided it wanted the comfort of a traditional outside agency).
As part of that briefing, we outlined the various strategies we employed–or tried to employ. With the country in recession in the early 1980s, the then senior management decreed that Americans weren’t concerned with traveling overseas.