For years, Mastercard has activated its GRAMMYs partnership through a dedicated broadcast TV moment. With millions of people tuning in to the GRAMMYs, this broadcast moment naturally reaches millions of viewers.
But this year, we saw an opportunity to make an impact at an even bigger scale—expanding our reach from a couple of million to a billion, and introducing priceless to a new cohort of young potential cardholders.
To achieve this objective, we needed to find an insight that would allow us to escape the boundaries of a traditional industry, even leveraging the power of social to transform a passive media moment into a participatory, emotionally-charged cultural experience.
By tapping into the behaviors of Gen Z music fans on platforms they use daily, we aimed to create a moment that would earn attention and drive brand preference for Mastercard with Gen Z like never before.
The music industry used to move top-down, with labels, radio stations, and TV networks shaping the culture and setting the trends.
Now, fans drive culture from the bottom up, turning songs into viral hits through remixes, resamples, and dance trends. They don’t just want to be passive listeners; they want to be part of the action.
To make our campaign truly priceless, we created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, giving fans from all walks of life the chance not just to be spectators, but to star in the action — and to do it alongside their favorite idol: Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga’s fan base—known for its passion and creativity—is among the most socially active in the world. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, fans don’t just listen to her music; they engage with it through dance challenges, duets, remixes, and cosplay.
Dance, in particular, has emerged as a dominant form of self-expression—a kind of social language where fans compete to create the most clever, absurd, or over-the-top version of a routine. These trends are fan-fueled, fast-moving, and inherently participatory.
This behavior inspired us to meet fans where they already were—creating a campaign that didn’t just invite them to watch, but to co-create. By leveraging the viral nature of social dance and the community’s instinct to perform, remix, and respond, we turned a music video launch into a global casting call.
That insight shaped our strategy. To reintroduce Mastercard’s priceless platform to a generation less familiar with it, we had to go beyond traditional messaging and engage through platform-native behavior.
We saw an opportunity to create direct engagement by embracing this organic fan behavior and amplifying it, using dance as the bridge to turn spectators into participants.
We kicked things off by using our GRAMMYs TV spot to debut the most anticipated music video of the year: Lady Gaga’s Abracadabra.
Then, we did something unexpected. Partnering with Gaga and her choreographer, Parris Goebel, we launched a dance audition with choreography adapted to be accessible, giving fans a direct call-to-action: recreate choreography from the video across social platforms for a chance to appear in the Fan Edit alongside Gaga herself.
With Gaga cheering them on, submissions flooded in from fans of all walks of life. All with one goal: to go from fan to featured.
When fans asked for more, we answered, releasing never-before-seen behind-the-scenes content that unpacked the artistry behind the choreography, storytelling, and costumes.
The finale? A fan edit of the music video, featuring 32 Little Monsters, which generated even more excitement as fans celebrated seeing “one of their own” in the spotlight.
By taking a bottom-up approach in how we fueled fan passion, we turned fans of Lady Gaga into fans of Mastercard, amplified Mastercard’s GRAMMYs presence like never before, and unlocked a new cohort of young cardholders.
Cultural movement: Over 2/3 of TikTok saw our launch video within just 48 hours. The campaign nearly tripled Mastercard’s social followers.
Earned attention: With over 1.4 billion video views—over half of them earned—we became TikTok’s #1 branded hashtag of 2025.
Brand preference: It drove a +29% brand lift among Gen Z—Mastercard’s largest Gen Z brand opinion uplift ever recorded.
But beyond the numbers and business benefits, this was about something more. We proved that music today isn’t just meant to be heard—it’s meant to be participated in.
We staged a complete paradigm shift.
Taking Gaga’s Little Monsters from fan…to featured.
