Mastercard / 1997
How Mastercard made a moment feel Priceless
1:26 / A short film by Chirag SpeaksWatch on YouTube
A father takes his son to a baseball game. There are things he can pay for, and then there is the moment he came for. Mastercard built a campaign around that distinction. In this film, you and I look at how a financial product found a place in the stories people wanted to tell about their lives.
The question to take with you
Are people choosing the product, or the life they hope it helps them live?
A closer look at the history
The campaign creator's account adds an important detail.
McCann's Joyce King Thomas describes two inputs to the original campaign: the practical brief of Mastercard acceptance at a baseball stadium, and research suggesting that time with family was becoming a stronger status symbol.
The consumer quotations in the film have not been verified against original research records. Read them as illustration rather than documented focus-group transcripts. The published account below is the primary reference for how the campaign developed.
Read the film transcript
From the published automatic captions, with names, spelling and punctuation cleaned. The history notes above provide context for the original narration.
Turn your TV to any channel in the late '90s and the message was clear. Credit card companies are bad and US consumers are being pushed to debt. Everywhere you went, you'd hear people are buying things they cannot afford. So when Mastercard decides to bring in a bunch of consumers to ask them the question, "What do you use your Mastercard for?" To their surprise, people did admit, "I'm buying something I cannot afford." But it was what came after that sentence that sparked an idea.
Welcome back to The Stories They Told: How Brands Have Shaped the World, episode 3. In the interviews, they heard things like, "I bought a TV I couldn't afford, so now I get to spend time with my family at dinner. I bought a baseball ticket I couldn't normally afford, but the look on my child's face was priceless." Mastercard began to obsess over this idea that their cards were not just utility or just a way to get credit. Instead, their cards were a key to help you unlock life's priceless moments.
Today, this is one of the longest running, most successful modern brand narratives, and it taught the industry a whole new philosophy. People don't build loyalty to a product's utility. They build loyalty around the life that the product helps them live. Soon after, we saw a major shift in brands realizing that the path to relevance was not through features or rates.
It was through an emotional promise. Soon after, every brand wanted to be in the lifestyle business. I'm Chirag, the brand historian, and in our next story, we will travel to Japan to see how a piece of candy changed an entire country's drinking culture.
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