• Visa is rolling out a new "V" to pop on mobile screens as people move to contactless payments.
• It's the company's first refresh of this size since 2021.
• Other brands have increasingly leaned on symbols and pared-down names for better mobile visibility.

Visa is betting that less is more when it comes to how it shows up to customers.

Starting Wednesday, the letter "V" will replace "Visa" in the center of its credit cards and on its digital properties, the company exclusively told Business Insider.

Visa's move signals that after 50 years of using the name, it feels it has enough brand recognition to be represented by a single letter. The change is also meant to pop more on small screens as people conduct more of their lives on their mobile devices.

In addition to the "V," Visa is introducing a new font, called Visa Sans, lopping off the serif in the first letter of "Visa."

The changes were developed by Visa's in-house creative studio and Base Design. It's Visa's first significant refresh since 2021, when it introduced a blue, white, and yellow flag-like brand symbol and a new font. With the new "V," that brand symbol will go away.

"There was an opportunity for us to modernize that and make it feel fresh, particularly for the next generation of consumers," Frank Cooper III, CMO of Visa, told CMO Insider. "We think it marries well with the evolution of the brand overall."

Cooper said the process took about a year.

"We do not have an awareness issue. We have deep trust. Playing around with the brand positioning is no light matter," he said.

Other big brands have increasingly leaned on symbols and pared-down names for better visibility on smaller screens.

Mastercard dropped its name from its logo in 2019. Google introduced a sans-serif logo and a new, four-color "G" icon in 2015.

Dan Nicholas, design director at creative studio Super Okay, said the move to a singular V aligns with a mobile-first approach that tech and media brands like Verizon and The New York Times have taken, in which they adopt a single letter as an icon.

He said the move simplifies Visa's appearance but could undermine brand recognition.

"What remains to be seen in the rollout is how Visa manages this new equity," he said. "If thoughtfully and strategically executed and invested in over the next few years, we can see it becoming a strong way for the brand to express itself."

Visa sees its visual changes as a companion to an effort to associate itself with culture and aspiration. It enlisted celebrities like Pharrell Williams for its "Power of Small Steps" campaign and has a partnership with the FIFA World Cup that extends through 2030. This year's World Cup campaign promoted its contactless payment option to emphasize that Visa's long-running slogan, "everywhere you want to be," was more than just a physical destination.

"We see that phrase now as representing both a physical destination and a personal aspiration," Cooper said.

• TikTok is moving on quickly after losing access to Meta's ads platform in some markets.
• It's shifted ad spend to YouTube, Pinterest, and mobile-app networks, according to Sensor Tower.
• TikTok was a prominent ad spender on Meta before its ousting on October 8.

TikTok's message to Meta: If you won't take our ad dollars, your competitors will.

Meta took a bold stance this month by blocking ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, from running ads on Meta apps in some markets. Why? Well, Meta's answer was pretty straightforward. It didn't want to "run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps."

TikTok is now redirecting that ad spend elsewhere.

Since the ban went into effect on October 8, TikTok has shifted its ad budgets to other platforms like YouTube and Pinterest, according to allocation estimates provided to CMO Insider by the analytics firm Sensor Tower.

The share of TikTok's ad spend that went to YouTube rose to 17% between October 9 and October 16, up from 9% in the first week of October. Meanwhile, its ad spend on Pinterest grew to 9% during the same period, up from 3% in the first week of October. A majority of TikTok's spend — 58% — went to mobile-app ad networks like Google's AdMob, up from 19% at the start of October, when Meta was still an option.

Meta's move against TikTok "highlights the growing intensity of the competition across the digital landscape and across the two of them," said Kate Black, EVP of social strategy at Horizon Media. "For marketers, this really just reinforces the need to be agile and build balanced media strategies — and not having all your eggs in one basket."

Meta's TikTok ousting isn't unprecedented. Other platforms like Amazon have previously blocked competitors from running ads, while Twitter in late 2022 restricted users' ability to link to their accounts on social apps like Instagram and Mastodon, calling it "free promotion."

"Declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice across industries," a Meta spokesperson said. Meta's changes will impact advertising policies in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

For Meta, a company that pulled in $117 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, losing one advertiser won't hurt much. Still, TikTok and ByteDance were notably prominent spenders on Meta's apps, according to Sensor Tower.

Meta will also lose ad spend from third-party marketers that link to TikTok or other ByteDance properties in their ads, further increasing its potential losses. Direct-to-consumer brands that may want to drive potential customers to TikTok Shop will miss out.

No Meta, no problem

For TikTok, losing access to Meta's more than 3 billion monthly users is a setback.

Like any social media giant, TikTok is incentivized to grow, grow, grow. Ads that target new users and drive new app downloads are part of the playbook — a strategy Meta uses to promote its own apps, like Instagram, too.

One TikTok staffer focused on user acquisition, James Gao, posted a LinkedIn callout on Sunday asking people to get in touch if they had ad inventory that could help the company meet its goals.

Horizon Media's Black said that while Meta controls the "lion's share" of social budgets, there are plenty of viable alternatives when it comes to using an ad to drive an action like an app download. Besides Google, YouTube, and Pinterest, marketers are increasingly turning to other platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, she said.