Insight
Creating Priceless Moments for cardholders is the heart of MasterCard, and Mother’s Day was an opportunity for their cardholders to surprise a special loved one.
Everyone has memories of special moments with their mothers - she’s been there through milestones and achievements, big and small. But how often have they played a part in fulfilling their mothers’ dreams?
When thinking of that the special way to show Mum how much she is appreciated, there is a peak of advertising tailored to offers and promotions, running the risk of having MasterCard’s message being diluted. How could Carat break through the noise and clutter, and stand out amongst other credit card promotions, in order to provide users with the relevant offer at the right time? How could it deliver and enable an emotional connection that goes beyond a transactional relationship, in order to drive consumers to take action?
To engage in a gift-centric holiday, MasterCard didn’t want to focus on promoting traditional gifting ideas for Mum, rather they wanted cardholders to think about how they can show their appreciation for their Mum through a Priceless Surprise. MasterCard can help elevate its cardholders’ Mother’s Day celebration across Asia Pacific by curating the most special offers and experiences, especially for her.
With 200 merchants and 530 million consumers, the key challenge was to match people in APAC with offers relevant to them at the most opportune time, and give someone a Priceless Surprise for their mum.
Strategy
Leading up to Mother’s Day, shoppers are in the frame of mind to purchase their mum a gift. However, MasterCard wanted to give its cardholders the option to get their mum a gift that was out of the ordinary, something that is priceless.
This could only be done using the MasterCard Digital & e-Commerce Engine. The Engine is built on a combination of sophisticated tech tools, platforms, people and processes allowing MasterCard to join these conversations.
To create a connection and to grab the attention of the target audience, an emotional spark was created with a call-to-action video featuring Hugh Jackman, inviting consumers to think of mum not as mum, but as a person with hopes and dreams of her own, and share stories of the priceless moments they would like to create for her. This is their chance to win her Priceless Surprise.
Insights gathered framed the Priceless Surprise moment for one lucky individual in each market and also highly relevant merchant partner offers that would be served at the most opportune time for their key purchasing decision.
With APAC being a highly diverse continent, the agency needed a channel to connect everyone’s data insights and allow the MasterCard Digital & e-Commerce Engine to serve the right offer to the right consumer at the right time. Facebook was the chosen primary platform because of its consistent high penetration across all markets.
Execution
To launch the campaign, a Call-to-Action video was promoted on Facebook. It featured a well-known celebrity, Hugh Jackman, who asked cardholders to think about what their mums truly wanted and deserved for Mother’s Day- serving as an emotional spark to kick-start the campaign.
A link on the video led to MasterCard’s Facebook page, introducing a contest where people would submit and share stories of what they would like to give their mothers, in the form of short video clips, photos and messages. Everyone who submitted their stories had a chance to win a Priceless Surprise for their mums.
The MasterCard Digital & e-Commerce Engine made up of a combination of sophisticated tech tools, platforms, people & processes, gathered audience insights. With these insights, bespoke merchant offers for shopping, travel, and dining were created and served with precise targeting to the audience with relevant interests on Facebook and Programmatic.
The ads were extremely pertinent to the audience because we used their conversations to frame the ad’s messaging and targeting; optimising daily at scale in real-time across six markets, 200 merchants, and 2,000 posts offers were based on people’s submissions.
With the MasterCard Digital & E-Commerce Engine, brand affinity and merchant offer transactions were driven by:
1. Precision targeting
2. Timing offers to deliver them when consumers are most receptive
3. Repackaged offers to emotionally engage with consumers
4. Algorithmic online offer placement
5. Accelerated, data-driven decision making
6. Optimising at scale in real-time across six markets, 200 merchants and 2,000 posts
Results
The campaign reached out to 131 million users in Australia, Hong Kong, China, India and Singapore.
It generated 9.8 million Engagements with the target audience. The campaign further generated 6.9 million video views and above all, MasterCard’s merchants received a whopping two million qualified leads. Click rates to merchant pages were 131% higher compared to the industry average.
• Australia: New channels enabled us to decrease cost per video view by 66%
• China: Leveraging key opinion leaders we improved click to merchant rates by over 80%
• Hong Kong: Highly local offer selection and segmentation enabled a 114% increase in engagement rate
• India: Stronger partnerships with merchants helped to achieve over 1 million merchant clicks
• Singapore: Leveraged real time data to drive 80% improvement on click to merchant rate.