The Campaign

Indian Independence Day is a day to celebrate the amazing rise of India – a time to reflect on the nation’s hopeful future and its deep history. It is an opportunity to recognize the efforts of all those who passionately pursue a cause they believe in that has touched our hearts and helped form the nation. For MasterCard it’s also a time of year with increased eCommerce transactions taking place and therefore a key time to tap into the culture. The campaign idea was developed to celebrate the ‘Power Of One’ by recognizing our nation’s unsung heroes, those individuals in our communities whose passion for making India rise are a source of pride and inspiration for all. We worked with Sunil Gavaskar to create emotive video content to encourage MasterCard Facebook fans to nominate the people they think have embodied the ‘Power Of One’ and helped India rise.

Creative Execution

Phase 1 of the campaign drives reach with exclusive celebrity content. Once we have achieved a critical mass of engagement we work with partners to segment and then re-message qualified audiences who have seen the content with our exclusive offers. Our tests show that this increases consumer response to our offers. For Phase 2 we worked with Facebook to develop tactics and targeting strategies that can drive performance. We implemented the innovative Ad Sequencing buying which enabled us to improve storytelling and increase consumer response to our offers by 186% and drive cost efficiencies by 200%. We leveraged new formats including Carousels which enabled us to showcase many merchant offers in 1 unit and ultimately drive up our consumer response rate by 200% above the industry average. Ongoing optimisations as part of the Engine model ensure that we constantly optimise investments and audiences to deliver best results possible.

Double digit YOY revenue growth for August 2015, outpacing the month-on-month growth from July 2015 by 5 times. Our content was viewed over 1.7 million times achieving the highest viewership and lowest cost ever recorded by MasterCard in 2015. Quality content was proven by Weighted Engagements Scores that were 4.5x higher than Financial Services industry, 5.6x higher than eCommerce industry, and 9.6x higher than Retail industry. The Engine strategy delivered response rates 340% above industry average, resulting in 1.2 million leads to our partner merchants. 1 of every 3 ads in the our category came from MasterCard and HDFC Bank, with an increase in positive sentiment recorded by both brands. Overall media value was 6 times higher than budget – due to the sharability of the content and the efficiencies gained by creating emotive stories.

The work is relevant for this award because we will demonstrate how we have taken a simple insight and combined it with powerful execution in terms of creative and media and generated record breaking results for the brand. MasterCard’s Digital and Social Business Engine is a combination of people, process, tech and tools that requires constant close collaboration between the client and partner agencies – it has transformed the way that MasterCard does business online and so deserves to be relevant to Spikes.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

MasterCard’s Engine approach always involves a culturally relevant trigger opportunity to hinge from. For this campaign it was Independence Day. Our strategy was to use this trigger opportunity and connect with people around the unsung heroes they thought had contributed to help India to rise. 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. Secondly, the stories that people contribute on our Facebook page help us to 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 was lead medium for the campaign. Our affluent audience have high consumption of social content and its flexibility also allows us to have a very close relationship with the audience in real time.