Objective

Mastercard’s Priceless.com provides Mastercard cardholders exclusive access to unforgettable experiences and valuable everyday discounts. This program encourages cardholders to “Start Something Priceless” using these exclusive experiences. To allow their cardholders to experience arts, culture, and travel from the comfort of their homes, using the latest technology, Mastercard worked with the Miami Design District and ROSE to create an augmented reality 360-degree immersive tour of the Miami Design District’s most iconic artwork and architecture as well as unique pieces from Craig Robins’ private collection, the entrepreneur, art collector, and CEO/president of Dacra, the real estate development company that owns The Miami Design District. 

Strategy

Using their mobile device, Mastercard cardholders can view seven rotating orbs, each representing and depicting one of the pieces from the Miami Design District via their AR-enabled camera. These orbs act as both the main menu for the experience and an  interactive art piece that nods to the Mastercard logo. Once an orb is selected, users are transported to the Miami Design District and can experience a 360-interactive view of the selected art pieces. Users can learn about each piece through audio and written descriptions inside each portal. Users can walk around these pieces by tapping or walking toward designated hotspots. The ability to walk around the 360 spaces provides users a greater sense of immersion and mimics how they would have experienced the works in person. The ability to tap hotspots to move makes the experience accessible for those that are less mobile or lack the space to walk. 

Users can tap nested portal doors to move to the next piece of art from within their current portal, allowing for a linear tour of the art pieces. Users can also select to move using a menu of all the works. To support 40 high-resolution images in the experience, one for each hotspot, without causing long buffering times between portals or hotspots, we wrote a custom router that preloaded pages so media would be fully loaded on consecutive pages before they needed to be shown to the user.

With this partnership, cardholders are given the exclusive opportunity to go through this immersive view of the Miami Design District’s collection. Featured works include Interdimensional Portal by Criola, Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, John Baldessari’s Fun Mural (Part 1), Wall Drawing #1138 by Sol LeWitt, Virgil Abloh’s Dollar a Gallon III, Standing Julian by Urs Fischer, and Jana Euler’s Two Brides.

Results

This campaign, while ongoing, has been considered successful for its deep user engagement. In the first 6 weeks of the campaign, the experience saw an average engagement time of 1 min 38 sec, with spikes as high as 14 min. On average, users explored 6 hotspots, with 3 art pieces explored on average per session, just under 50% of the art pieces offered within the experience. 26% of users returned to the AR experience again. 

Media