The Campaign

Insight: Many Indian parents work so hard to provide for their families that they end up spending more time at work than with their loved ones. They make promises to each other to travel as a family and explore the amazing places beyond India, however these often go unrealised. Idea: MasterCard’s brand belief of connecting people to Priceless Possibilities enabled us to define the campaign idea as “Fulfil a Promise”. Two of India’s most famous actors; Anil and Sonam Kapoor stared in our emotional video prompting people to think about and to share a promise they’re yet to fulfil, and how they can make it come true in Singapore with MasterCard. The replies are a source of insight to ensure that the next set of creative is in line with the audience’s needs and wants.

Creative Execution

Phase 1: We drove reach with exclusive celebrity content and created an emotional bond.Our tests show that this increases consumer response to our offers. We implemented reach and frequency buying to enable cost effective reach. Once we had built a significant audience pool we were able to segment them into custom audiences based on attitudinal and behavioral preferences and move into Phase 2: Serve relevant merchant offers based on individual preferences. We leveraged new formats including Canvas which enabled us to showcase both upper funnel emotional content along with lower funnel direct response content and Cinemagraphs which drove further 40% traction above.

25% better results than the 2012-2015 CAGR of 2.4% CAGR. This was a challenge since in 2015 close to $8MM was invested in media driving visitors to Singapore and the media budget for 2016 targeting Indian visitors was $300K. So the Engine not only helped accelerate results, but did so with a much smaller investment. That growth was influenced thanks to the power of our celebrity led emotive storytelling where we saw a response to content which was 200% higher than the industry’s. We implemented innovations including Canvas - the newest Facebook placement that was used to deliver emotive and offer content in the same unit. People engaged with it 60% above industry average. Cinemagraphs were also used for the first time. The innovative format delivered an ER 40% above the industry. Engaging formats along with constant media optimisation under the Engine process helped us to deliver.

The work is relevant for Media Spikes because we took a difficult business problem – converting heavy cash users from India into card users by applying our Engine planning methodology. Our responsive campaign was designed to reach people travelling between India and Singapore and used social as the principle touch point for understanding customers’ needs and wants. We accelerated growth of business by 25% above previous annual growth and proved that the Engine works for driving card spend among people who traditionally deal in cash.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Our Engine strategy is to first emotionally connect with parents around the promises they would like to fulfil to their children. We do this to ensure that there is an emotional connection with the brand as we do not believe that business can be driven without it. Once a bond has been created we then serve offers, which receive greater attention from users because of the emotional bond that was created. Secondly, the stories that people contribute help us understand what people really care about in real time – we use these insights to create the most relevant offers and serve them on the most relevant platforms. Social, particularly on mobile was lead medium for the campaign, our Indian travelers have high consumption of travel related content on social whilst in India and it’s the platform which enables us to have a 1-to-1 conversation with our audience.