The Brands Behind the Brands: How Checkout.com Made Invisibility a Growth Strategy
Checkout.com is a payments infrastructure company processing transactions for Spotify, Uber, eBay, Pinterest and TikTok. By design, you've never noticed it. At SXSW London, its CMO, Rory O’Neil, explained why making that invisibility strategic, rather than accidental, is now the company's defining marketing challenge: how to be famous in the rooms where payments contracts are signed, while staying invisible in the consumer journeys those contracts power. Here's how he's solving it.
There is a mural on Tabernacle Street in London. Most people walk past it without giving it much thought. That is, more or less, the point. Checkout.com painted it there because, in the words of the company's CMO, "we were desperate to get in front of you." For a company that processes payments for some of the largest brands in the world, invisibility is usually the job. The brand works best when nobody notices it.
But the commercial stakes of that invisibility are unusually high. Payments only get noticed when they fail. "When you put your card in a machine, 99.9% of the time worldwide, it will work these days. When you use the same card online, for exactly the same goods and services, that acceptance rate can drop to about 80%."
For brands operating at scale, that gap is not a technical footnote. Chasing one basis point can mean "millions and millions of dollars." Checkout.com exists to close that gap, using AI, data science and machine learning to keep transactions moving. The better it works, the less visible it becomes.
"You and I, we don't like to pay for anything," he said. "So payments should never be noticed in that sort of customer journey."
That is the strategic tension. Checkout.com is critical to the customer experience, but deliberately absent from it. The company helps transactions move, revenue land, and customers stay in flow. Then it disappears. The marketing question is what to do about that on purpose.
Invisibility, Repositioned as the Pitch
The result is a brand that is well known in one room and largely unknown in another. "We are very well known in our core target audience, which is a head of payment inside of a big brand that's processing over $100 million or more online a year." That audience understands the stakes. They know what acceptance rates mean. They know the commercial value of fewer failed transactions.
The problem is that buying decisions do not sit only with heads of payment. "60 to 65% of all payment contracts are signed by the CFO or they're signed by the CTO." And in those rooms, Checkout.com is much less established. That gap, known to the practitioner and invisible to the signatory, is the defining marketing problem for any infrastructure brand operating at scale.
The obvious response would be to explain more. More product language. More category education. More corporate positioning. Checkout.com has taken a different route. It has leaned into the anonymity.
The creative idea flips the usual B2B script. "You don't know who we are," as the CMO put it. "You shouldn't know who we are and we're the brands that are behind brands that you would really recognize."
That is the power of the campaign. It does not try to hide the obscurity. It makes the obscurity the point. Checkout.com is not asking to be famous in the consumer journey. It’s asking the right business buyers to understand why its invisibility matters.
Targeted Reach, Not Blanket Awareness
The media strategy follows the same logic. This is not awareness for awareness' sake. It is precision visibility. Checkout.com targets the executives it needs to reach in the places those executives already are. "They're on the transport networks. They're going to industry shows."
That means high-impact placements around major industry moments. City transport takeovers in New York and San Francisco. Visibility at Times Square and the World Trade Center. Activity timed around the calendar moments when the right people are already paying attention.
The campaign does not stop at the billboard. Everything gets filmed, repurposed, and fed back into performance and retargeting. The aim is to make sure "the contacts we're trying to reach and the accounts we want to try and reach are actually getting to look at the adverts."
It’s B2B media planning with consumer-grade discipline. Big enough to create memory, and targeted enough to matter commercially.
Why Consumer Marketers Are B2B's Quiet Advantage
That approach is shaped by a career that spans both consumer and business marketing. O’Neil came through BlackBerry before moving to Samsung and eventually into payments. That background informs a clear view: consumer marketers may be one of B2B's most underused advantages.
"Consumer marketeers are grounded in data, insight, and action."
They understand brand building. They understand performance. They understand how to earn attention and convert it into commercial outcomes. In B2B, that skillset can expose how blunt the category still often is.
"The level of personalization in B2B is like, hi, you're the CFO of a company, would you like to buy a photocopier? It can be that basic."
Checkout.com's work is an argument against that kind of generic targeting. The company is not marketing to "businesses." It’s marketing to specific people inside specific buying committees, with specific commercial anxieties.
What BlackBerry Actually Taught
The BlackBerry chapter comes up for obvious reasons. It was one of the defining technology stories of its era, and one of the clearest examples of what happens when markets move faster than organizations.
"BlackBerry grew so fast so quickly. Ultimately, it was a talent question."
The lesson was not framed as regret, but rather as education.
"I learned more at BlackBerry probably than any other stage of my career."
What it clarified was the importance of matching ambition with capability. Growth creates pressure. Category change exposes weaknesses. The market does not wait for teams to catch up. That lesson carries into Checkout.com, where the brand has to scale awareness without losing precision, and build fame without creating the wrong kind of attention.
The Four Words That Filter Every Checkout.com Asset
Checkout.com's brand is built around four attributes: expert, humble, unconventional, ambitious.
"Those four attributes... is what shapes all of our work."
They are not internal decorations. They function as a filter. Every asset, from performance creative to outdoor media, is judged against them. Does it show expertise? Does it avoid arrogance? Does it feel different? Does it carry the scale of the company's ambition?
"Every time you touch the brand, you either polish it or you dent it."
That line captures the discipline behind the work. Brand is not just the big campaign. It’s every interaction. Every ad, every sales deck, and every moment a buyer forms an impression.
Brand Is a Growth Requirement, Not a Decoration
The commercial case for brand investment is grounded in how B2B buying actually works.
"When B2B buyers go through their cycle, 95% of the time, brands or vendors that are on the day one top five list are the brands that win the deal."
Buyers are already deep into the journey before they ever speak to sales. They spend 60% of that journey before making contact with a salesperson. By the time a formal process begins, much of the consideration set is already formed.
For Checkout.com, that makes brand a growth requirement. If the company is not remembered before the buying process starts, it cannot rely on bottom-of-funnel activity to fix the problem later. Memory has to be built upstream, or the deal is lost before the pitch.
The CMO frames the job in three parts: "We have three major jobs to be done. We've got anybody that's in market, we've got to make sure that they want to choose Checkout. Anybody that's not in market, the next time they do, we want Checkout at the top of the list. And for those that are existing customers, we want them to grow."
That’s the full system: conversion, memory, and expansion. Not separate disciplines, but connected jobs.
Logic and Magic
The bigger point is about marketing itself.
"We are both logic and magic in everything we do," O’Neil said.
That combination matters more than most realize. The logic is in the data, targeting, buying committee insight, and commercial measurement. The magic is in the idea that makes an invisible payments company worth noticing.
For Checkout.com, marketing is not a support function. It’s not a cost center waiting to be justified. It is, in O’Neil's words, "a commercial function. We invest company money to help businesses grow."
Marketing builds memory before demand exists. It sharpens preference when buyers enter the market. It gives sales a better starting point, and it turns invisibility into an advantage.
For a company built to disappear, that may be the most useful definition of what marketing actually does.
