The Campaign

For Kiwis, rugby is a religion …and former All Blacks captain Richie McCaw a god. Tap For Your Town gave towns in New Zealand the opportunity to bring Richie out of retirement and play one last game of rugby against their town’s local team. To change the transaction behaviour of an entire nation, we made tapping more than just a way to pay, but a matter of town pride. A Priceless game of touch rugby with Richie was to be both an incentive and a communications platform. The rules were simple: the town with the most taps would win.

Creative Execution

Tap For Your Town went live on the 17th June, as a fully integrated campaign (TVC, YouTube, Facebook, OOH, Radio, In-Store, Digital) kicked off a tapping frenzy across the entire nation. For 10 weeks, we monitored the real-time tapping data and social media data of 66 New Zealand towns. This allowed us to follow inter-town banter as it happened, and respond with real-time communications to fuel the fierce local rivalries. During the campaign, we created and over 400 pieces of town-targeted social creative, including geo-targeted creative, leaderboards and personalised shout-outs from Richie himself. The highly-anticipated game was promoted for 8 weeks on social media, including Richie’s personal Facebook page, the country’s biggest morning shows, news programs and newspapers. On the 28th October, Richie’s team took on the Queenstown locals in a broadcast to 480,000 New Zealanders on Facebook Live—making it the biggest game of touch rugby in New Zealand’s history.

Results

This highly targeted data approach to communications, specifically designed to resonate with our audience on a grassroots level, ensured New Zealand’s highest ever tap transaction rates. During the campaign period, New Zealand towns together made 13.24 million taps, compared to 8.94 million taps in the same period in 2016 (an increase of 48% year on year). Monthly taps increased by 17% from 4.52 million to 5.29 million, monthly frequency increased by 11% from an average of 8.1 to 9.0 taps, and the penetration of tapping behaviour increased by 31,000 active cardholders from 531,000 to 562,000. The campaign reached 97% of New Zealanders while generating 48.3 million impressions (a number 10 times greater than the national population). These results are projected to deliver over 10 million additional transactions across next 12 months, equating to NZD$212 million of spending in local towns. Money that would’ve otherwise gone to the eBay and Amazon.

Tap For Your Town used real time data of actual Mastercard taps in retail stores, to create live progress reports of which town was leading with the most taps. Our algorithm translated the data into a tap per capita score to create an accurate and balanced leaderboard, effectively giving small towns the chance to compete against bigger towns. The campaign also used real time social data to create town specific reactive social posts encouraging towns who were behind to tap even more.

Tap For Your Town used a strategy of combining both rugby and local rivalries to make tapping more than just a way to pay, giving all New Zealanders the opportunity to bring Richie McCaw out of retirement and into their town to play a game of touch rugby against their local team. Our target audience was all the card-inserting, PIN-punching New Zealanders, to whom Mastercard a relative newcomer compared to main rivals Visa. The aim was to get them to discover the ease of tapping their Mastercards so they could tap more and help stimulate their local economy. For decades Mastercard has communicated with its strategy of Priceless, and to New Zealanders there’s nothing more Priceless than bringing a living legend out of retirement and into their town…let alone being one of the local players that get to take their field and take on one of their idols.