Mastercard has been a proud partner of Rugby World Cup since 2011. The partnership with this property is to drive fan engagement for the brand globally; and demonstrate Mastercard as an innovative technology brand.

This needed to be achieved at a tournament being played in Japan – a non-English speaking, non-traditional rugby market where the brand has low market presence.

The challenge we faced was to maintain global fan engagement and conversation across a 6 week tournament, demonstrating Mastercard’s tech focus.

Mastercard identified the marquee sponsorship asset of the tournament, the presentation of the Player of the Match trophy, to achieve the following campaign goals:

• Drive Consumer Engagement

• Increase Brand Awareness

• Showcase Mastercard as an Innovative Brand

The Live Trophy, presented by Mastercard

Our love of sport is defined, not by the outcome, but by moments that take our breath away. The record books capture the score, but they miss the story.

Sport is about the moments where heroes are built, nations unite, and generations are inspired. These moments are Priceless, and it is these moments that matter to Mastercard.

So as the world leaned in to watch the drama of the Rugby World Cup, we turned the Player of the Match Trophy from a static record of a match, to a story of the fan’s Priceless moments.

We brought together global fans, Japanese design and live storytelling to capture every game of the tournament. We live etched the fans Priceless moments of the match onto the trophy and gifted it to the Player of the Match, seconds after the final whistle, for the world to witness.

A majority of Mastercard audience would not be lucky enough to travel to Japan to attend at the tournament in person so we needed to enable fans outside of Japan to be connected. We made our impact reaching fans during their most engaged and passionate rugby moments – in game!

We leveraged the marquee sponsorship asset of the tournament – the Mastercard Player of The Match Trophy. This asset aligned us with the pinnacle of performance, rewarding the best players in the world, however we knew the reward should be gifted from fans themselves.

We chronicled the best on-field game moments as felt by fans and ceremoniously presented these to the hero of the game in Live Broadcast.

Mastercard and partner World Rugby encouraged fans to share their Priceless moments of the match during every game – as if we could stop them!

The fan engagement, top comments and spikes of activity was paired to the Official Broadcast commentary. How? We used voice AI to capture the commentators powerful prose and matched fans passion through a bespoke social listening API. This allowed us to laser etched the Priceless moments of the game onto the metal Player of the Match trophy – a world first!

Fans and athletes loved the creation of the revolutionary trophy, they saluted the POTM and widely shared the behind-the-scenes content – because this trophy was made by them, in an instant and commemorated each match forever.

We combined the power of live sports entertainment, digital media buying and real time storytelling to immerse fans around the world into each match and across the whole

Mastercard created Live Trophies at 45 matches in 12 stadiums across 6 weeks earning the attention of fans, players and the media alike. We drove incredible conversation around Mastercard’s technology prowess, all to help get fans closer to the Priceless moments they love.

Increase Brand Awareness

• 80% share of voice amongst RWC Worldwide Partners (WWP)

• 3.06 billion cumulative reach including 45M video views

• Earned more than $3.7M of media due to the innovative real time storytelling with a 50% ?lower CPV than the benchmark

• Earned media mentions 6 x higher than WWP Average

Drive Consumer Engagement:

• 470.5 Million interactions on posts promoting Mastercard

• Generated reach of over 47mm via 547 press placements

• Earned the 2nd & 3rd most shared hashtags at RWC2019

• Leveraged 7 global Influencers delivering an estimated 3.7MM organic impressions at ERs of 3.32% for IG (+66% to benchmark)