Mastercard
Paying Tribue to Leading Ambassador & Football Legend, Lionel Messi
After an incredible victory for Argentina at the 2023 World Cup, Mastercard wanted to pay tribute to their leading ambassador, football legend Lionel Messi, across a series of activations from February – June 2023. These activations ran in tandem with the UEFA Champions League 22/23 and consisted of: The Messi Surprise Sweepstake, Team of Leo’s, the Team of Leo’s Filter, the Messi Mural Timelapse and Sharing The Love of Football.
Inspiring the Next Generation of “Leos”
We executed a total of 5 phased activations from February-June 2023, using influencers rooted in the football community and culture, across key target territories – UK, France, Germany and Spain – to share their support of Lionel Messi and his legacy. Having Messi as an ambassador and content supporting his top level involvelement served as an advantage in the negotiation stages, meaning we had a lot of interest, genuine excitement and demand for participation on this campaign.
The launch of the video “El equipo de los Leos,” quickly captured the hearts of fans as they watched Lionel Messi’s surprised reaction towards a gathering of children who all bear the name Leo on their Mastercard football jersey’s showcasing how inspirational Messi has become to the world and how he is such a positive role model for the next generation of football players.
Taking a targeted approach to our influencers’ highly engaged football communities, we were able to garner excitement and buzz, successfully placing Mastercard at the centre of culture and the conversation during one of the sport’s most talked about events. Our cross territory approach to influencer content not only enabled further support to be driven towards local Mastercard channels, but also created more visibility for the wider campaign amongst relevant audiences at a much larger scale.
Placing Mastercard at the Centre of Culture
In total, we saw a delivery of 812K impression, overdelivering against the predicted KPI impressions 15%. Despite having to pivot at many points during the campaign, our strategy to fully utilize deliverables against strong campaign messaging meant we were still able to achieve successful results from an influencer perspective. Managing influencer relationships across the term of the campaign was paramount to ensure our influencers delivered content that spoke to their community, taking into consideration cultural differences in our key territories and building true adovocy between the influencers and Mastercard.