Mastercard: No escape

Mastercard has pulled off a casting coup of sorts. The global credit-card payments company has roped in cricketers Sachin Tendulkar, Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan for its latest campaign on the theme of ‘Escape’.

Mastercard’s recent outing comes after nearly two years. The earlier ad featured a man in his thirties flying business class to reunite with three college friends. He flashes back to a time when they would hang out in the college cafeteria, and as the bill would arrive each would try to pass it on to the other. Fifteen years later they meet at a five-star restaurant and this time each of them is fighting over paying the bill.

The new Escape campaign, while based on the theme of travel, is a far cry from the earlier campaign. Here we see the cricketers wanting to escape to Kenya as they can’t deal with the fans who are everywhere. But even once they get to Kenya they can’t manage to get away from the fans. So they decide to go to the Masai Mara jungle but even there the local tribesmen recognise them, leaving the cricketers stunned, albeit with smiles on their faces.

“Our campaigns of late have consistently focused on travel, be it the reunion ad or the ad where the boy takes his parents abroad; so it was only natural for the latest ad also to be on the same lines,” explains Raja Balasubramanian, Vice-president (marketing, India), MasterCard Worldwide.

The campaign is an offshoot of an insight that affluent Indians are travelling like never before. Once there, they are able to break free and let their hair down. According to Balasubramanian, this is particularly true for celebrities. Moreover, as the sponsor of the Mumbai Indians team of the Indian Premier League, MasterCard was keen to use celebrity players. Thus the brief given to the company’s agency, McCann Erickson, was to make a clutter-breaking advertisement that underscores how MasterCard makes travel convenient.

“We’ve been doing ads periodically and we want to give cross-border messages a thrust,” says Balasubramanian. On MasterCard’s two-year hiatus, Balasubramanian says, “There’s no hard and fast rule to come out with an ad every year, besides the reunion ad is an evergreen one and we can always go back to it.”

The ad is targeted at individuals aged above 25 across socio-economic categories and will air across channels that target this audience. It was shot over a period of three months during IPL in Mumbai and Kenya. It broke in the last week of June and is likely to air till July and will be reviewed thereafter. In addition to the TV campaign, the ad will be leveraged across print, out of home, cinema, digital and in-flight activation.