Cannonball Creative Sells the Complicated Stuff

An agency can make a payment company sound interesting and still find getting paid a chore. Cannonball Creative has occupied both sides of that sentence. It has helped Visa market financial products, then appeared in Visa’s own account of a supplier improving its payment operations. For a business built around persuasion, the arrangement is unusually revealing: the argument eventually reaches the accounts department.

The San Francisco company works on subjects that demand explanation before they earn attention. Its services span advertising, branding, writing, design, video and sales enablement. The useful question about this agency is what happens between a client’s complicated business problem and the finished thing a buyer sees. A white paper, a campaign and an executive interview each have to carry an argument without losing the audience along the way.

Visa gives the story a business end

Cannonball’s published campaign overview credits its global Visa Protect work with more than $5 million in pipeline and engagement rates 50 percent above industry benchmarks. The subject was Visa’s risk and security offering. This is territory where an attractive image has to coexist with a credible explanation of what the product does.

Those are agency-reported campaign figures. Pipeline describes potential business moving through a sales process; it is different from completed sales. That distinction matters to anyone assessing a creative partner. A campaign can help open a commercial conversation while the eventual purchase still depends on product fit, procurement and the sales team. The interesting feature of Cannonball’s claim is its choice to foreground a business measure.

Visa appears elsewhere in the agency’s public work. In a post about the 2025 Global Product Drop, managing director Dixie Ricards described Cannonball’s contribution to a video featuring Visa’s Oliver Jenkyn and OpenAI’s Sarah Friar. The assignment put the agency close to a familiar communications challenge: making a senior-level discussion of emerging commerce understandable on screen.

The subject alone does not make an agency an AI company. It does show the range of material enterprise marketers need explained. An executive conversation asks something different of a creative team than a fraud-prevention campaign. It needs a coherent sequence of ideas, a watchable presentation and enough specificity to reward the viewer’s time. The shared requirement is editorial judgment.

Two decades before the opening credits

Founders Chris Gatewood and Andrew Schmeling did not begin their working relationship with Cannonball. Their earlier portfolio site says they spent nearly 20 years together as a creative team before founding the business. It lists experience on accounts including Electronic Arts, Adidas, Mitsubishi Cars, Toyota Racing, Jim Beam Brands and Google. These are the founders’ prior agency credentials, rather than a list of contracts won by their new company.

That history makes the firm’s emphasis on experienced people easier to understand. Two collaborators who have spent years solving briefs together bring an established working relationship to a new venture. For prospective clients, the relevant test is whether that experience reaches the actual assignment: who interprets the problem, who writes, who designs and who makes decisions when a deadline compresses.

Cannonball’s company profile dates its founding to 2016 and places its headquarters in San Francisco, with a Los Angeles location also listed. Its advertised capabilities include content marketing, brand messaging, animation and web design. That combination places it in the creative-services market for businesses that need both a position to take and materials that express it.

Think of a marketing director with a research report, a product launch and a sales meeting approaching. Buying the writing, visuals and presentation work separately means managing the seams between them. An agency offering those disciplines together is selling coordination as part of the assignment. The quality of that coordination is something a buyer can inspect in a proposed team and delivery plan.

The edit behind the polished pitch

One of the more useful windows into Cannonball comes from Zack Shaw’s public CV. Shaw lists himself as editorial practice lead from January 2025. His responsibilities include assigning freelance writers, coordinating with project managers, and editing white papers, articles, infographics, web pages and sales decks. He also identifies AI-generated material among the content he edits.

That is a more concrete description of content marketing than a promise to tell better stories. There is an assignment process. There are writers and project managers. There is editing for structure as well as sentences. A piece can be grammatically tidy and still take too long to make its point. Developmental editing addresses that larger problem before polishing the smaller ones.

Shaw’s academic background includes English, film and media studies. The combination is a small but telling detail in an agency concerned with both written and visual communication. A white paper needs an argument the reader can follow; a video needs a sequence the viewer wants to continue watching. In each case, a strong opening creates an obligation for the material that follows.

The agency’s financial-services connections also extend to Paypr.work, which lists Cannonball Creative and Visa together among organizations it has worked with. Paypr.work presents itself as a group of payments strategists producing research and creative material. That public association is consistent with a practical requirement of the category: subject knowledge has to survive the journey into marketing copy.

A team sized to the question

Cannonball describes assembling teams from a roster of specialists around the work at hand. Its cultural language adds a useful qualification. On its About page, the agency emphasizes responsibility, curiosity and disciplined collaboration. The phrase that lands most cleanly is “Taking ownership, not orders.” It is a compact promise about how people are expected to behave.

“Taking ownership, not orders”

Cannonball Creative’s stated working principles

For a client, that promise is worth translating into operational questions. Who owns the brief when research changes it? Who resolves a disagreement between the writer and designer? Who has authority to stop an asset that looks finished but makes an unclear claim? Responsibility becomes useful when it comes with a named person and a decision they can actually make.

The competitive choice is therefore broader than one agency versus another. A company could use an internal department, hire individual freelancers, commission a specialist studio or engage a broader creative partner. Cannonball’s proposition is most intelligible when several disciplines must agree on the same business story. A narrowly defined production job may need fewer moving parts. A complex assignment needs enough coordination to prevent the client from becoming the full-time interpreter.

Then the invoice needed an edit

Visa’s supplier account describes an operational constraint behind Cannonball’s project-based business: its existing web payment system charged 3-4 percent and required manual entry. Larger payments also strained the fit of its accounting tools. The attraction of change was faster collection with less handling.

Working with PayNation and Visa, the agency moved qualifying commercial transactions to Level 3 processing and used Visa AR Manager for automation. It reported receiving automated virtual-card transactions within two weeks and reducing manual receivables work by 80 percent. Visa dates the self-reported results to November 2025.

The lesson is to examine the entire collection process: fees, administrative effort and the wait for cash. Specialized processing depends on eligible transactions and customer payment preferences. Those conditions belong in the calculation before anyone copies the setup. A cheaper-looking payment method can still demand expensive attention.

Managing partner Connor Stock also appears in Visa’s one-hour commercial-card acceptance webinar, alongside Visa representatives and PayNation CEO Perryn Holtrop. It gives the agency a different role from the one clients usually see: a supplier discussing its own experience. The polished marketing message has a working business sitting behind it.

Give the buyer something to do

Stock’s public updates describe continuing work with Visa Commercial Solutions, including a video about card transactions and help launching the 2026 small-business banking report, The Multiplier Effect. These examples make the agency’s position fairly clear. It operates where research, product explanation and commercial persuasion overlap.

A reader can borrow a useful discipline from that mix. Start a brief with the business decision the audience faces. Specify what evidence would help them make it. Decide how the finished material will reach them and what a useful response would look like. Then choose the format. This is an editorial reading of Cannonball’s work, rather than a proprietary process attributed to the firm.

The approach needs a real proposition to explain and people empowered to approve it. More copy will not settle an unresolved product decision; a film cannot supply evidence the business does not possess. But when the substance is there, turning it into something readable, watchable and usable is valuable work. Cannonball’s public record is most persuasive at that practical level: helping a complicated business make its case.