Visa is widening its aperture. In a new ad for the financial services company narrated by Ryan Reynolds that’s set on a haunted desert island, the company is pitching itself not just for everywhere you want to be anymore, but everywhere you don’t want to be.

“True story: we actually pitched this campaign idea to Visa years ago and it kind of went nowhere,” Reynolds tells Fast Company. “Lots of time brands will come to us and say ‘scare us’ and then we do and they run away screaming. It wasn’t until early this year when I got connected to [Visa CMO] Frank [Cooper] and I half jokingly told him we had worked on this idea and he was like . . . wait a second . . .”

The spot, by the production company Maximum Effort that Reynolds and George Dewey cofounded in 2018, imagines Fyre Fest but spookier. The failed music festival is a zombie brand that sold its brand assets in July on eBay for $245,300 to a mystery buyer. Its value isn’t in putting on a successful music festival, but for the meme of it all.

Reynolds then closes out the ad with Visa’s slogan “everywhere you want to be,” and follows it up with his subversive twist, “and some places you really don’t.”

Reynolds calls the process of creating the ad “fairly simple”: “Take an iconic positioning and try to bring new life to it with a simple subversion. It’s core to how we think at Maximum Effort,” he says. The  production company is behind ads for brands like Mint Mobile, Netflix, and July’s quick-turnaround video for Astronomer starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and now it’s bringing humor to the staid payments category.

A new twist on an old slogan

Visa used the slogan, “It’s everywhere you want to be” from 1985 to 2006 and brought it back in shortened form in 2014 as just “Everywhere you want to be.” The slogan was about connecting the brand to experiences, Cooper, Visa’s CMO, says.

“Everywhere you want to be was closely connected to the idea of cross-border travel, which is one of the major areas for transactions for Visa,” he says. But now the company is looking to expand on it.

“People want solutions to two things,” Cooper says. “Problems and dreams, and so we gave them the dreams part.” The new version of the slogan is about solving problems.

Visa, which reported reported $10.2 billion net revenue in the most recent quarter, faces a shifting payments landscape where upstart buy-now-pay-later services like Affirm and Klarna compete now with longtime consumer finance giants. In tapping Reynolds, referencing Fyre Fest, and playing with humor, Visa is looking to compete on new ground.

“Historically, humor has not played a central role in the brand,” Cooper says. “I think the view has been in financial services overall—and even in payments—that, hey, this is a very serious category.”

But the serious approach is taking a backseat in a world where attention is the ultimate currency.

“In a world where we’re battling for attention, and the hardest part is having the stopping power… humor is a great angle in,” Cooper says.