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Company: Weber Shandwick Belgium
Company Description: MasterCard is a leading global payments company and serves as a franchisor, processor and advisor to the payments industry, making commerce happen by providing a critical economic link among financial institutions, governments, businesses, merchants, and cardholders worldwide. It provides electronic payments convenience for everyone in more than 210 countries and territories.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Marketing - Consumer Services
Nomination Title: MasterCard's Maestro Angels
Tell the story about this nominated campaign since 1 January 2010 (up to 500 words). Be sure to cover the genesis, development, performance, and results of the campaign.
CHALLENGE
Maestro, MasterCard’s debit card brand, features on almost every Belgian bank card, but most consumers didn’t know they could use it in shops and restaurants across Europe.
MasterCard Europe tasked its agencies to run a PR-led campaign that would show Belgians how easily Maestro could be used when travelling in Europe.
The objectives were:
• Raise awareness of Maestro among Belgians and show how easy it was to use for in-store payments abroad
• Change behaviour, with a higher number of Belgian consumers using Maestro at point-of-sale
Research showed 1.7m Belgians would be driving through France during summer 2010. Most said they found their journey on the Autoroute de Soleil arduous, as the route from Dijon to Lyon becomes one big traffic jam at the end of July with overcrowded service stations, and they would welcome a relaxing break on the way.
SOLUTION
Weber Shandwick translated the key attributes of the Maestro brand – payment convenience making life easier and more pleasurable for travellers – into a creative campaign concept: ‘Maestro Angels’. These would be Maestro’s ‘missionaries’ in France who would take some of the stress out of the holiday drive for Belgian tourists.
In phase one, the results of a survey into Belgians’ biggest annoyances en route to their holiday were used as a hook to launch a recruitment campaign (online, posters in universities, media outreach and advertorials) calling on Belgian students to become a Maestro Angel.
In phase two, four teams of Maestro Angels were fielded at service stations along the Dijon-Lyon road from 21-28 July. The teams competed to complete missions suggested by the public via the campaign website www.maestroangels.be , including massages, hugs, car washing, dog walking, and playing petanque, while promoting the convenience, safety and speed of Maestro.
Each team posted daily movies of its adventures. The team that received the most ‘like’ votes for its videos walked away with a €1,000 travel voucher and a donation of €5,000 for the Make a Wish children’s charity.
RESULTS
The PR-driven, integrated campaign yielded impressive media coverage and met the objective of increasing visibility of Maestro among Belgian consumers:
• 1,200 Belgian holidaymakers encountered the Angels
• 21 press and 37 online articles, 22 radio interviews, and 50 radio ads – reaching 8 million people six times each
More than half of the visitors came through word-of-mouth, PR and social media and campaigning by the Maestro Angels and their friends and families:
• There were 136,000 visits to the website
• 112,000 unique visitors watched 36 film clips over the eight days of the campaign
• 130,000 votes were cast online to choose the winning team
• The winning team received an incredible 58,000 votes
Most importantly, the campaign had a tangible effect on how many Belgians actually used their Maestro cards.
List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, video clips, work samples, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
http://thestevies.com/IBA11Attachments/MasterCardEurope/MaestroAngels/
Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that carried out this nominated communications program:
Robin Roothans is an Account Manager in the Consumer team at Weber Shandwick in Brussels, leading on key financial & tech accounts on the Belgian market. He has more than eight years’ communications experience which he garnered both in-house and in agencies. Other than MasterCard, Robin provides communications counsel to Belgian bank, an asset manager and some tech clients including Symantec.cloud. A Belgian national, Robin is a native Dutch speaker and is also fluent in French, English and German, with good working knowledge of Italian.
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