The Campaign

To develop content that's relatable yet aspiring to the masses, Mastercard conducted a real life experiment to see if anyone had what it takes to become a star on the red carpet event of the year Cannes Film Festival. This kicks start our campaign “Mastercard and Standard Chartered Present: Regular to Red Carpet”. Our creative idea stayed true our hypothesis in every sense of the word. We set out to cast 2 ordinary people, not by their looks nor by luck, but rather by their charisma. In order to isolate our criteria down to charisma, we took a leap of faith and did what we’ve never done before casting the contestants in the dark. The two chosen contestants were judged purely by their ability to charm our judges. Thereafter, they became the protagonists in our stream of branded content. Our fan base also played a key role

Creative Execution

We rolled out our 3-month social campaign on the MasterCard Facebook page as the main channel of content distribution. Facebook is the top-of-mind platform where our local audiences look for bite-sized and relevant entertainment. Our community participated throughout the whole process starting from: - submitting stories in public recruitment to go to audition for Cannes - seeing winners selection through “Casting in the Dark” - helping to unlock a series of fame booster activities to transform the two ordinary winners - watching real-time Cannes experiences of the two winners leveraging Facebook’s new Live Video function We created a simple, hardworking and interesting social engagement mechanics that lasted for 20 days. It is built around a key credit card feature and this allowed us to blend in the other important credit card features tactfully and seamlessly into the content. This generated high engagement and also exposed the card features to 4.8 million people alone and drove our core

Out of the competitive industry environment, the campaign successfully achieved the result below: - Reached 6.2 million of people in 3 months on Facebook, 23.37% are earned organic reach - Key video content achieved 31.64% organic reach - Accumulated 2 million video views, watched by 49% of Hong Kong’s Facebook population - Achieved 3.9% of engagement rate throughout the campaign, which is 3 times better than the benchmark of the Finance & Banking industry The result has proven that relatable content can help drive outstanding engagement, education and awareness of products.

Credit card brands' campaigns typically operate in this same register-and-win formula. They bait the public with near-impossible chances of winning the grand prize, setting themselves up to disappoint the thousands who entered. The moment after the winners are drawn, brands offer no reason for audiences to watch the prize fulfilment that weren’t theirs. It’s no surprise that brands see their engagement come to a halt as soon as the winners are announced. So we flipped this convention on its head, by turning the reward fulfilment into our own storyline. The journey of two ordinary people to Cannes was not only served as highly relatable branded-content to our audiences, we effectively spun this into a whole host of content extensions to educate our community about the new Asia Miles credit card. We involved our fan base at every step of the process, allowing them to collectively unlock extra footage and win bonus