Mastercard: The Rugby World Cup

Credits & Description:

Client: MasterCard
Country: UK
Agency: Carat UK
Description:
THE CHALLENGE:
The challenge for Carat and MasterCard at such a high-profile global event was to make sure that its advertising stood out as relevant during the Rugby World Cup. The competition to be noticed amongst all the brands participating was fierce.
The second part of the challenge was a desire to properly engage with the Rugby World Cup audience. The aim was to be a service for fans, i.e. be genuinely useful and interesting: to improve fans' experience and bring the action closer to them.
WHAT WE DID:
To achieve these goals Carat’s Social Insight team devised a solution of always-on social listening combined with a panel of real fans:
Using its proprietary ‘NOW Engine’ approach to allow social listening insight to be pulled in real-time around events to fuel ideation, creative iteration and media planning. By utilising real-time global social listening on Rugby World Cup conversations, we were able to present a rounded view of audience sentiment for very specific events. This included a daily trend report, specific in-tournaments analyses, segmentations of fans who engaged with an emotional spark video for merchant offers, and identifying influencers for priceless surprises.
Carat’s Social Insight team partnered with Twitter’s Ad Research team and an exclusive research community of Twitter Insiders. This allowed MasterCard to get real-time feedback from Twitter users as the campaign progressed. Specifically, Carat and MasterCard were able to access feedback, conduct research and do creative testing in real-time and then optimise campaigns accordingly. Carat and Twitter used Twitter Insiders to run activity with users every week of the Rugby World Cup, which directly informed MasterCard’s campaign.
The beauty of this dual approach was results could be put speedily into action. For instance, this allowed tweaks to audience targeting, Man of the Match voting mechanisms or creative executions.
HOW WE DID IT:
Firstly, Andy Fairclough from Carat outlined an insights strategy that focused on the key areas of focus in MasterCard’s social strategy: namely its core assets of Man of the Match award and #PricelessSurprise. This allowed us to define our social listening to areas of relevance, as well as being reactive enough to pick up trending moments of interest to fans as the tournament progressed.
For Twitter Insiders the team mirrored MasterCard’s audience segmentation in Twitter Insiders. This meant Carat could talk directly to hard-core rugby fans, casual fans and what we call ‘big eventers’ – those only interested in the tournament because it was a big tournament on British soil.
Carat and Twitter also set up a process for weekly synchronisation between the three teams (client, agency, media owner) to determine areas for exploration for the week. Finally, the group ran activities and worked together to put insights into actionable forms for the planning teams and client.