MasterCard developed an aggressive corporate card market-penetration campaign to reposition its product, and launched card activation campaigns. The result of the strategy yielded a 32% growth in comparison with the same period in the previous year. However, the challenge was to grow even more in 2005. The campaign objective was to celebrate MasterCard’s outstanding results among its issuers, and garner their commitment for the 2005 goals. The target audience was composed of directors, executive officers, and managers of the corporate bankcard segment that are MasterCard partners.

To garner the commitment of partner bank executives to the aggressive MasterCard goals for 2005, the strategy was to send a very compelling direct mail piece. Based on the concept of "Recipe", MasterCard celebrated the growth in its 2004 market pie (cake in Portuguese) and invited the executives to join them in making next year’s pie. Just like a recipe needs good ingredients, the MasterCard recipe for success needed partners that were committed and engaged.

MasterCard considered the results excellent. The total campaign investment was US$26,000 for 90 impacts. The cost per impact, therefore, was US$289.A surprising result: 100%, meaning that all its clients took on the commitment to MasterCard, committing to additional billings of US$423,000. The return on each dollar invested was US$15.27, or 1,527%. Other factors also bore out the campaign success: all the customers expressed how much they liked the approach, and many partners not receiving the piece called MasterCard requesting a copy.