What it was
Five years of always-on advertising and content for a global brand, with no creative team, no photography and no production budget.
My role
Social and content strategy; creative testing
Priceless Cities
Five years of always-on advertising and content for a global brand, with no creative team, no photography and no production budget.
The situation
Priceless Cities was Mastercard's experiential access programme — dining, sport, arts and culture in dozens of cities worldwide, in a market where Groupon and LivingSocial had made geo-targeted offers ordinary. It ran continuously and it needed advertising and content continuously.
What it did not have was any means of making them. There was no dedicated social creative team — creatives were assigned to campaign work and launches, not to content calendars. There was no photography budget. The existing image libraries were barely usable.
That is the ordinary condition of most social teams inside large organisations, and almost nobody says so.
The thinking
Everything came from one of three places. Partner assets, rebuilt into branded advertising. My own photography. Or work sourced from photographers shooting the events around the world that Mastercard was already sponsoring — the sponsorship was paying for a presence at hundreds of events a year, and nobody was treating that as a content supply chain. It became one.
Then the part that mattered more. With a large media budget and no way to be certain what would work, the only responsible thing to do was test — continuously, at volume, with many copy variations running against each other and the budget following the winners rather than the opinion.
That is now automated and has a name. In 2013 it was manual, and doing it meant arguing for it.
The clearest example is on the Priceless New Year page: rather than debate whether unpolished user photography could carry paid advertising for a global financial brand, I ran a dark post against a small audience — a stylised branded visual against a snapshot of my husband and me at SantaCon. The snapshot won by a wide margin. That answer released the whole budget.
The method has not changed since. Write the positioning, make the asset, run the test, read the result — and let the result overrule everyone in the room, including me.
