Best New Marketing Campaign: MasterCard's 'Home for the Holidays'

  Though credit card companies constantly tout the latest technological innovations, such as tap-and-go readers or embedded memory chips, they still struggle to make consumers see their cards as something more than just cold pieces of plastic used for payment transactions.
  This year's winner of Cards&Payments' 2007 Best in Payments Best New Marketing Campaign award, MasterCard Worldwide's "Home for the Holidays" promotion aimed for the heart by associating MasterCard payment cards with the themes of home and gift giving. Consumers who used their MasterCards between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 last year became eligible to win the top awards, two $350,000 homes.
  But MasterCard officials say an accompanying online instant-win game, through which MasterCard gave away other major prizes every day, may have been a bigger success.
  Throughout the holidays, visitors to priceless.com, MasterCard's promotional Web site, could play a match game that also qualified them to win one of the homes. MasterCard marketers hoped visitors to the site also would learn about other giveaways and special deals and view MasterCard commercials and learn about the company's products.
  The game also maintained home-related themes, as each day winners were awarded home furnishings from Best Buy for a room in their house. According to MasterCard's consumer research, almost everything that consumers feel is special about the holidays, including family gatherings and gift giving, takes place at home, says Cheryl Guerin, MasterCard vice president for promotions. This promotion gave MasterCard "the ability to emotionally connect with the cardholder during that season."
  And MasterCard kept issuers involved. Member banks had the opportunity to send specific messages about gift cards or other offerings to their cardholders while they played the online game. MasterCard distributed tens of millions of promotional materials that were sent either with issuers' mailed statements or in e-mail messages, Guerin says.
  During the holidays, nearly 14 million cardholders played the MasterCard online game, and they remained on the site for an average of six minutes, says Guerin. Opportunities to have cardholders spend time with the brand are rare, she adds, but the online game meant "this year, we had significantly more direct involvement with cardholders. That's exciting for us."
  Coordinating all the different promotions that go into something such as "Home for the Holidays" takes time, Guerin adds. Planning for each year's holiday campaign begins at least 12 months to 14 months before the event's launch.
  Although MasterCard has not announced any details about this year's holiday promotion, Guerin says it will "have even more online engagement." An October 2006 survey of 1,638 cardholders commissioned by MasterCard found that three out of four planned to shop online during the holidays, and Guerin says online spending has been increasing by an average of about 20% each year.
  The increasing importance of payment cards to holiday gift-giving means consumers probably will see more attempts by card companies to portray their products as embodying the holiday spirit.
  "The card associations tend to want to create that warm and fuzzy feeling about the ownership of their brand," says David W. Lott, senior vice president of Speer & Associates Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based consultancy.
  This year's runners up were...
  * Heartland Payment Systems' Merchant Bill of Rights
  * VeriFone's "On the Spot" Campaign
  * Bank of Nova Scotia's Pre-Second Redemption Campaign
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