Mastercard wanted to encourage customers to do something magnificent through their dining and grocery purchases. From May 1 through July 15, 2022, every time Mastercard cardholders ordered online or tapped their card at qualifying restaurants and grocery stores, Mastercard donated 1 cent, up to $5 million to Stand Up To Cancer. To publicize this effort and raise awareness for Stand Up To Cancer, Mastercard produced a series of spots featuring three-time Emmy award-winning actor and producer Sterling K. Brown, demonstrating how cardholders could support essential cancer research through everyday purchases. To bring this campaign to social media, Mastercard wanted to create a Snapchat lens that brought users into the commercial while providing them information about the campaign.
In the campaign spots, Sterling K. Brown is a barista who explains the campaign to coffee shop patrons before giving them a latte, complete with latte art of their faces. This moment underscores the fact that the cardholder is an integral part of the campaign and that the transaction goes beyond just a transaction.
To re-create this moment for Snapchat users, the existing campaign footage was edited to remove the surrounding environment from Brown, essentially creating an alpha video. To make it feel like the user was at the counter of the coffee shop from the TV spot, a counter, and backdrop were added to provide a foreground, middle-ground, and background. To begin, Snapchat users took a photo of themselves, at which point users were brought into the coffee shop and presented with a digital Mastercard and a virtual Point-of-Sale system on the counter. Users were instructed to tap the screen which triggered the digital Mastercard to tap the POS system.
Upon tapping, Brown appears behind the counter and explains the promotion personally to the user. Then, just like in the commercial, a latte appears on the coffee shop counter, complete with foam art of the user’s face. The action of using the virtual Mastercard inside the virtual coffee shop environment underscored how cardholders could contribute to the campaign and how easy it was to do so.
In the 6-day campaign, the lens garnered over 10 million impressions and over 45,000 interactions.
