ORLANDO — MasterCard’s “Priceless” marketing campaign has been running in various guises since 1997 now. This year, the company has tried to infuse it with “multi-sensory marketing”.
But being MasterCard’s chief marketer isn’t all about experience, however. The financial services company is also swimming in consumer financial data to better customize its own offerings and its marketing.
In this video interview with Beet.TV at the ANA Masters Of Marketing conference, Raja Rajamannar explains how his team is doing that, sensitively.
“As people are spending on their cards, the data is moving over our rails,” he tells Beet.TV. “We know things like where they are spending, but we don’t know who is spending or what they are spending on. We know the frequencies, we know the intensities.
“If I’m launching a new campaign or a new product, I’m easily able to … see the results saying that has my spending on the overall network gone up in that space or not. Based on those learnings, we can plan our media and all the promotional activities much better in a very, very well-targeted fashion.”
This year, MasterCard added “senses” to “Priceless”:
- Sight: New symbol brand, introduced in January, dropped the name from its famous interlocking circles.
- Sound: The company has a new “sonic brand identity“, a track scored with the help of Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, including a brief tune that will play whenever consumers use their cards in physical, digital and voice environments.
- Taste: Next up, MasterCard recently recreated four international restaurants in New York and one in Rome, aiming to “curate priceless experiences and make ‘Priceless’ tangible”.
“We’ve used the same dishes, the same menu, the same utensils, and people even speak Swahili,” says MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar in this video interview with Beet.TV. “You get a near-real experience as though you’re sitting on the beach, you’re watching the waves come by, and then slowly the sun starts setting.
“We’ll be, hopefully, embarking on this journey even more aggressively and launch a lot, many more restaurants around the world.”
This video is was produce in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
