MasterCard mines social trends and data to ‘connect the right offer to the right consumer’
MasterCard is talking to banks across Asia Pacific, including Australia, as it rolls out new data-driven marketing technology that allows offers to be driven “to the right consumer at the right time”.
The technology, called Priceless Engine, uses more than 20 tech platforms to crunch data, monitor consumer trends and study social media conversations to determine what offers to send, at what time and to which consumers.
Asia Pacific group marketing head Sam Ahmed said it will allow MasterCard, retail and bank partners to see within an hour whether a marketing campaign is working.
“We get immediate responses on what is what is working and what is not,” he said. “We are publishing where the consumers are, on Facebook, on paid media. I can publish to two million people in a split second, and in an hour I can find out what is working.”
He said traditionally it would take four months to assess whether a campaign has worked and by that time “the campaign has finished”.
MasterCard will be working closely with key partners in the social media space, including Facebook with which it has signed a two-year partnership. These partnerships will give consumers in the region “unprecedented access to the most relevant, timely and quality offers”, Ahmed said.
The first Australian campaign using Priceless Engine is based around Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience World Tour, which MasterCard sponsors. Ahmed described the campaign as “more than a pilot as it is driving transactions” but admitted it was also a “test and learn” initiative to examine how offers should be tailored to Australian consumers. More campaigns are expected to launch in the first quarter of 2015.
He said the technology is not about creating “great ads” but driving transactions. In one example of the effectiveness of the engine, Ahmed said the inclusion of a red carpet in a black and white Justin Timberlake ad saw response rocket by 30 per cent.
“It brings together real-time online consumer trends with social marketing data to refine the e-commerce offers that MasterCard presents to people online, in conjunction with our banking and retail partners,” he said.
Ahmed said in today’s digital marketing world, brands which deliver the wrong ad to the wrong consumer are regarded as spam.
“Consumer expectations are higher than what companies can deliver, there is real gap and you can look old fashioned very quickly if you don’t have the right content at the right time,” he said. “Consumers, especially millennials, are saying ‘you have my data, use it properly’. Brands which don’t do that are seen as spam.
“Priceless Engine allows us to deliver offers and experiences in real time with relevant content to the right consumer. We mine all this data but it’s dead data unless you use it right.
“Our relevancy in this is really important. You don’t share your mortgage update, you don’t share your investment update, so the engagement level the banking partners are looking for from us is around this payment area.”
Steve Jones
