A Lesson in Media Integration
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but they were just the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Now is a crucial time for companies to book sales during an otherwise lackluster year. And this is the time of year when it pays to watch what major advertisers are doing.
There’s a marked increase in advertisers using a well-coordinated combination of print, television, and all forms of online media to get the biggest bang for their buck and to reach consumers in the media of their choice.
One example worth looking at is MasterCard’s current campaign. MasterCard is a different kind of advertiser because it is essentially a generic brand. There is no such thing as a pure MasterCard credit card – it must be paired up with a bank that provides the financial mechanism for providing credit and completing the credit transaction.
Still, MasterCard is in a perennial battle with its direct rival, Visa, and with American Express, for credit card supremacy. That’s why MasterCard has been running the “Priceless” campaign for years – to reinforce the brand image and encourage consumers to use MasterCard credit cards over others.
Now MasterCard is putting a new twist on the “Priceless” campaign by adding an interesting online app, the “MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder”.
A few weeks ago, MasterCard launched television and online ads that will run through Christmas, featuring football quarterback Peyton Manning and “How I Met Your Mother” actress Alyson Hannigan. The ads humorously address the importance of giving the right gifts and promote the MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder application as the way to do it.
The Gift Finder website is slick in its execution. Manning and Hannigan act as video guides, helping consumers find a perfect gift for a Facebook friend, or “for a friend who isn’t on Facebook.” The application connects directly with Facebook, so a user can bring their friends from Facebook to the Gift Finder, and use the Gift Finder to publish content to a user’s wall.
The application leads a user through a gift selection process by asking questions about the user’s gift recipient and then suggesting gifts to purchase via Amazon.com, the Gift Finder’s “featured” online store. Peyton and Alyson appear at various intervals during the selection process to liven things up. The application can be shared through a Facebook page, Twitter account, or via MySpace, Delicious, Digg, or StumbleUpon.
MasterCard takes this a giant step further with its “Priceless Picks” application for the iPhone. This free application lets iPhone users find “priceless things” – thousands of user-recommended priceless experiences, shops, and restaurants – share them with friends, and add their own “priceless picks.” This app perfectly integrates another channel, mobile, into the Gift Finder campaign.
Cheryl Guerin, a senior vice president with MasterCard Worldwide, told Brandweek magazine that the Gift Finder is designed to leverage the way a consumer shops: “The utility of the tool makes it easy to select these perfect gifts, while tracking a budget and managing a holiday shopping list using social media applications that are already a part of many shoppers lives.”
Expect to see more advertisers put media integration to effective use this holiday season.
