Scaling Global Brand Storytelling

Global financial services brand Mastercard was looking to revolutionize the way they interact with fans on social. The Communications team found that while they had a lot of reach globally, they only owned 1% of the conversation about their brand. Powered by Percolate, the communications team built a central global publishing system that localizes content and engages with Mastercard fans around the world, in 7 regions and 11 languages.

Summary

3 Introduction 5 Challenges 7 Creating Consistent, Branded Content 10 Creating a Global Experience 13 Increasing Visual Content 16 Conclusion & Metrics

Contents

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IntroductionAlmost four years ago, the Mastercard Corporate Communications team turned to social listening and realized that although Mastercard reached millions of people across the globe each month on social, the brand owned less than 1% of the conversation. In short, its broadcast-style social media efforts weren’t translating to share of voice or engagement.

Since then, Mastercard has been hard at work transforming the way it communicates and engages with its audience. Today, Mastercard engages directly with almost 200,000 influencers per quarter, with people creating over 500,000 pieces of unique content quarterly to advocate their story. In 2013 alone, Mastercard’s new approach to communication exposed the brand 1.3 billion times to its social audience.

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“Our goal was simple. Lead a conversation that allows us to inform, engage and demonstrate the value that Mastercard is bringing to the media, bloggers and our stakeholders without simply shouting messages from a soapbox.”

– Andrew Bowins, SVP of External Communications

Evolving Mastercard’s owned and social media channels has been an integral part of the company’s transformation to communicate and engage with digital consumers and influencers. At the center of its brand publishing ecosystem is the Mastercard Engagement Bureau and Cashless Pioneers Blog – a reinvention of the traditional corporate newsroom.

A multi-channel, responsively-designed approach, the Mastercard Engagement Bureau spans 7 regions—U.S./Global, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa, Europe, Russia, Canada, and Latin America— and 11 languages, including English (American and UK), Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Italian, enabling the worldwide communications team to coordinate global and local actions, including sharing news, circulating valuable content and engaging with audiences around its corporate mission of a world beyond cash.

In the midst of this transformation, SVP of External Communications Andrew Bowins and VP of Global Digital Communications Jennifer Stalzer saw a need for systematic content curation and creation, and turned to Percolate for help. In September 2013, the Newsroom was re-branded as the Global Engagement Bureau. Powered by Percolate, it was launched to promote visual storytelling and enable Mastercard to create, share and publish more digital content in real-time.

But launching the Global Engagement Bureau meant that Mastercard had to commit to crafting and sharing a much larger volume of consistently on-brand content across many different regions, countries, and languages. This presented Mastercard with three important challenges.

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Challenge 1The first challenge was creating authentic, curated communications that were more diverse than simple news releases, aligned around five main brand pillars, and consistent with Mastercard’s brand and corporate mission. With so many different global team members involved in the publishing process, Mastercard needed a systematic approach to creating topic-driven content that would be interesting and relevant to its many different audiences.

Normally, managing such a massive global content network would require significant extra resources from agency partners and internal teams to ensure strategies stayed consistent across markets. But with the formation of the Global Engagement Bureau, Mastercard’s content output increased exponentially, but staff resources did not in increase to match. How did Mastercard create an infrastructure to deliver on-brand content across the world faster, smarter and more cost-effectively?

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Challenge 2This led to the second challenge: creating a global experience for Mastercard followers, fans and influencers. How did Mastercard deliver a better, more relevant brand experience to different sub-segments of its global audience?

Challenge 3Third, Mastercard wanted to increase the amount of visual content it produced, as well as the number of channels it published to. How did Mastercard manage and scale visual content distribution so efficiently?

This case study examines how Percolate has helped Mastercard build a world-class global content network. The following sections walk through how its teams — led by Bowins and Stalzer — measurably increased the consistency, authenticity and reach of Mastercard’s social communications.

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Creating Consistent, Branded ContentIn addition to everything else that they do, brands are now expected to be publishers. Companies increasingly produce tremendous amounts of original marketing messages, which has led to a branded content arms race.

For Mastercard, one of the brand’s initial goals was to create a richer, more diverse mix of content. However, the traditional role of corporate communications within the organization was to share basic news content like event information and press kits. Before the creation of the Global Engagement Bureau, Mastercard was limited in its content scope: shares consisted mostly of already public press releases, as well as other standardized information and news about the company and its offerings. Rather than simply publishing news content, the new Newsroom was envisioned as an engine for consistent and effective thought leadership.

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What are today’s important trends in mobile payments and financial inclusion? Mastercard was committed to answer that question in real-time, giving its audience relevant, curated news as it happened. To do that, Mastercard needed to focus on curating more tactical and engaging content around the five areas they cared most strongly about: innovation/the future of payments, financial inclusion, safety and security, travel, and small business.

With Percolate’s help, Engagement Bureau team members are prompted to create content aligned with Mastercard’s five brand topics, assisted by recommendations about what Mastercard’s consumers and audiences are passionate about; an integrated Media Library of on-brand stock assets; an algorithm to source topical news of interest; and a marketplace where Mastercard can source written and visual content from Percolate partners like Getty Images.

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People creating content worldwide

Posts published through Percolate

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One example of a particularly popular and successful news piece was a story about how Mastercard supported the World Food Program, which gave hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees displaced in Lebanon access to food without the exchange of cash.

Mastercard’s brand pillars are standardized across each of its Percolate licenses, so every created post is mapped and tagged with one of the five “topics”. Subtopics underneath also measure whether a message is tailored to consumers, merchants, government, or influencers. This system has allowed Mastercard to not only track and systematize what the brand talks about, but also who it reaches.

Creating a Global ExperienceAs a global brand covering 210 countries in 150 currencies, Mastercard knew it needed an effective method to scale its communications and provide local stories to many different countries.

Before implementing Percolate, Mastercard had to approach its content on a market-by-market basis, with no centralized oversight of image or production quality. This was problematic, particularly given the necessity of maintaining consistency across a wide global scale. Localizing Mastercard’s key brand pillars and replicating them across markets was hard to do. How could Mastercard scale globally while keeping its messaging personal in each market?

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First, Percolate personalizes its software user experience for different Mastercard teams. Users in France, for example, would see only French stories; in Latin America, Percolate provided teams with recommended content streams in Portuguese and Spanish.

To empower customized content across different countries, the partnership between Mastercard Corporate Communications and Percolate has expanded to almost twenty licenses, covering 18 separate markets around the world, with each license customized to support local content creation around the same five global brand pillars.

To help Mastercard scale its teams’ local content productivity, Percolate released new features to promote more efficient team collaboration and information sharing. One of these key releases in early 2014 was Percolate’s integrated global Marketing Planner.

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Countries are monitored on social in 11 languages

Increase in traffic to newsroom.mastercard.com

%

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The Marketing Planner has enabled Mastercard to not only plan content, but also identify what different communications teams are creating across different channels. In turn, these insights have helped Mastercard Corporate Communications standardize and centralize content and publishing collaboration. As the brand’s communication efforts have broadened beyond press releases and press kits, Percolate’s Marketing Planner has allowed for easier, brief-based idea and project sharing amongst different local teams, which can then be tracked and referenced by more remote regional and global teams.

Despite differences across languages, cultures and borders, all 77 of Mastercard Corporate Communications’ Percolate users worldwide now create content using the same workflow, oriented toward the same goal: how can Mastercard become a recognized thought leader across all five brand topics in every market the brand touches?

Increasing Visual ContentMastercard’s old Newsroom was text heavy. Through a traffic audit, Stalzer’s teams realized overall engagement had become stagnant, but visual content -- specifically, photos and videos -- consistently performed well. In response, Mastercard developed a visually-led strategy to boost inbound traffic and sharing of its newsroom content, supported by Percolate’s creation technology.

Live events are also great sources of on-brand visuals and campaigns, but documenting them in real-time and sharing them at the speed of social remains a challenge, due to delivery and approval roadblocks. With the Photographer mobile app, Mastercard sent staff to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to document exciting news items about how mobile is transforming commerce and payments. Over the course of the event, Mastercard used Percolate’s app to capture brand photos for customization and real-time publishing.

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With Percolate’s user-generated content sourcing functionality, Mastercard also curated user-generated content straight from followers in Barcelona who included the campaign hashtag #SelflessSelfie, using Percolate’s integrated media release software to obtain image rights to the content. Percolate let Mastercard secure full legal rights to user content in minutes, eliminating the need for repetitive social media compliance checks. Everyone who took a #SelflessSelfie automatically donated $1 to the World Food Program every time Mastercard sourced, retweeted, and created posts with the submitted selfies.

Because of the wide global reach of the Engagement Bureau, Mastercard had to re-create many of its images on a market-by-market basis, with no centralized oversight of image or production quality. Customizing high-quality, on-brand visuals was also a costly and time-consuming undertaking.

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Images uploaded and created in the Percolate asset manager

Images edited and branded with Percolate’s image editor

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Thanks to content partners like Getty Images and Shutterstock, Percolate suggests collections of brand-appropriate images for Mastercard to use in reactive, real-time social conversations. Like all posts, each image is tagged to one of Mastercard’s five key brand pillars and stored in a central, analyzable Media Library, allowing Mastercard to examine which topics generate the most interest and visual engagement.

Once an image is saved, uploaded or sourced to the Media Library, Mastercard’s teams can easily customize images to quickly apply approved Mastercard corporate branding using the Percolate Image Editor. The Editor, the first visual editing software specifically designed to help brands create consistent content, has all of Mastercard’s custom visual identity elements preloaded, allowing for scalable, brand-safe image creation. With Percolate, Mastercard can plan, source, store, tag, edit, design and publish rich visual content, all in one central software tool.

Since the relaunch of Mastercard’s NewsRoom, website traffic to newsroom.Mastercard.com has increased 300%. Today, the brand’s content is seen by 30 million people each week across its social and digital properties.

In the third quarter of 2014, Mastercard brand publishing efforts (Engagement Bureau, Twitter, LinkedIn) saw 138,000 unique users, produced almost 2,500 pieces of original content and reached over 1.2 million people. Over the first 6 months of 2014, the Engagement Bureau alone saw a 104% organic growth in monthly visits, while time spent per visit increased to 5.7 minutes (+132%) compared to the same period in 2013, with top referrals coming from top-tier and trade media, and social.

With a central global publishing system, Mastercard distributes authentic, relevant and locally-informed content across 7 regions and 11 languages. Mastercard’s active social engagement has seen about 200,000 influencers per quarter. With the help of Percolate, Mastercard’s digital community-building has been driven by consistent, organic growth through high-quality content.

Conclusion & Metrics

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Percolate is The System of Record for Marketing. Our technology helps the world’s largest and fastest- growing brands at every step of the marketing process.

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