The Campaign

Insight: Many 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 proposition 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 worked with our mobile partner to create custom audiences exclusive to MasterCard. These bespoke audiences helped us drive response because they gave us laser precision targeting of our most valuable audiences. We leveraged the native functionality of the mobile phone by identifying when one of our audience has left India and arrived in Singapore. Once they had arrived we then served them the most relevant offers they could enjoy during their stay – such as restaurants and attractions.

25% better results than the 2012-2015 CAGR of 2.4% CAGR. This was a challenge since in 2016 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. For our Merchant partners, our strategy that focused on mobile helped drive our unprecedented results - we achieved a CTR of over 40% above the benchmark on mobile platform InMobi. On Facebook, mobile targeted placements performed 300% better than the channel’s benchmark CTR. Our continual audience and device optimization using the Engine methodology helped us to achieve this result.

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 a mobile solution which drove results. Our mobile first campaign reached people travelling between India and Singapore and used the mobile phone as the principle touch-point for communications. Our campaign aided point-of-sale spend increase by Indian MasterCard cardholders in Singapore by 25% YoY growth vs 2012-2015 CAGR (3% vs 2.4%).

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Our Engine strategy was 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. Media strategy hinged on mobile due to the massive consumption exhibited by the audience. Mobile would also be key in continuing communication post-departure, when they had landed in Singapore. Research showed that mobile is the device that stays for the duration of the trip.