The Brief

530 million people in Asia-Pacific have opted-in to receive online offers from brands, but a lack of understanding of their consumers forced financial services businesses to randomly push merchant offers and content to consumers through digital channels. This approach has become spam without relevance. The challenge was to cut through the clutter with content and offers that were truly considered relevant. MasterCard launched ‘The Digital and eCommerce Engine’: an innovative media-marketing platform (consisting of people, processes and technology) that turns big data into usable data, allowing MasterCard to deliver the RIGHT content and offers to the RIGHT people at the RIGHT time.

The ultimate goal for MasterCard is to be able to personalise all content and offers. In other words from 1 piece of creative pushed to an audience of 100M to 100M pieces of personalised creative to 100M consumers. The results to date have proven to propel business results dramatically. The results of the latest MasterCard campaign – powered by The Digital and eCommerce Engine - were unlike MasterCard has ever seen. The campaign drove over 100% higher engagement rates in every market, compared to any previous MasterCard campaign. The growth rates didn’t grow all of a sudden, but were the product of the Priceless Engine planning principles of constantly listening and acting accordingly. Across the region, the hyper targeted and relevant offers that we shared during the campaign, drove over 3million qualified leads to our merchant partners. The detailed market-by-market results from the campaign using Priceless Engine can be found in the attached PDF (Innovation Entry – Results table.pdf)

Previously, credit card companies didn’t have any relationship with their end users; banks and merchants did. This made it impossible to serve the right content and offers to them. The Engine allows MasterCard to turn data into relevant and meaningful insights. These are used to create the right content for the right consumer at the right time. As a result, MasterCard’s content and offers are no longer seen as spam. To maintain continuity across the region, the engine set-up was the same in each market and consisted of: 1. Technology An integrated suite of real-time tools for trends & insights, listening, content publishing, targeted media and business decisioning. 2. People A dedicated team of digital experts such as a project manager, a digital strategist, a data scientist, a community manager and a content writer. 3. Dynamic Analytics Turning big data into usable data (14billion A/P transactions, 650million cards, 1.2billion internet users, 900million on social). 4. Process Real-time partnership decision-making when it comes to opportunity identification, content matching, offer creation and revenue acceleration and measurement. 5. Offer Management Selecting the right offer at the right time out of 9M A/P merchants and 5K global offers every day. 6. Precision Targeting The right emotional connection drives consumers to share personal stories. The data that is derived from these stories are harnessed in data analytics and used for programmatic buying and paid media optimization. 7. Facebook partnership A strategic partnership to optimize insights & analytics, to benefit from creative business consultation, a higher service level and specific training. 8. Emotional connection Leveraging MasterCard’s sponsorship assets and Priceless Surprises to deliver content that sparks engagement in order to find deep consumer insights. This model doesn’t only help MasterCard to build more meaningful relationships with their end-consumers, but also with bank and merchant partners