The Campaign

Mastercard found out there has been a big shift in Japanese consumers value, their desire has been shifting from “things (31.9%)” to “experiences (62%)” Mastercard knew that this was the right moment to release their newly developed campaign “Priceless Japan”, to stand as a brand that believes “experience matter more than things”. We decided to get Japanese to find the best of Japan they never knew, since it is usually hidden from plain sight. Even for Japanese, their own country can be surprising. A multi-platinum award winning musician Gwen Stefani and an iconic fashion designer in Japan Keita Maruyama, were strategically selected and chosen as Priceless Japan ambassadors, to connect Japanese consumers with the Priceless Japan experiences for finding highly relevant contents.

Creative Execution

We paired up the two ambassadors to deliver a series of videos to engage with the consumers. We leveraged the context of each ambassador's background and framed the videos' narative based on 'Lost in Translation' - where Keita was meant to help Gwen with the translations for Japanese audience and as it got closer to the marquee events, Keita secretively engaged the consumers to plan a surprise for Gwen when she visited Japan. These events consisted of access to Fashion Week Tokyo, and Gwen's 1 night only private concert in Tokyo and many more. To top up the hype, we put a twist at the end when one of our Japanese cardholders (who is a big fan of Gwen) was chosen for his idea on how to surprise her and turned out our two ambassadors had actually planned a Priceless Surprise for him.

The results were overwhelming, exceeding all financial services benchmarks in Japan. ?17 million video views (6million completed views) ?Social & programmatic video content had 4x and 2 x higher response rates vs competition (most viewed video on LINE) ?Social amplification through Gwen’s own channels (her posts on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and FB received more than 500,000 likes collectively), and influencers like Japanese actress Yu Yamada (her post at Gwen’s concert received 17,400 likes), legendary singer Maki Nomiya and television presenter Harry Sugiyama to name a few, who were in attendance at our events. All of these were driven organically with no media dollars. ?Media value of $12million vs our $2.5million investment ?Over 2,000 attendees to Gwens live concert derived. ?Delivered over 700 priceless surprises derived. ?36 million consumers reached (31% of online population) ?19 million consumer engagements (1.5x above benchmarks) ?1.8 million clicks to purchase (14x industry average)

We knew that social media and use of influencers would be a key to bring our brands back to life, since everyday use of social media is big in Japan, and influencers creates more engagement with consumers. We found out the affluent consumers find fashion industry is an aspiration for them and feel a strong sense of affinity with foreign artists fond of Japanese culture. So we carefully selected a local ambassador to represent the brand and tied to this passion point, hence Keita Maruyama an iconic fashion designer. We also recognized the need to come in with a big bang to create an impact for the brand, given the 'silence' for the past 10 years. So we brought in an international super star Gwen Stefani who can deliver the wow effect yet still relevant to the Japanese audience. These two ambassadors has massively been used throughout social media.