March saw Mastercard team up with Lionel Messi to leverage the UEFA Champions League with a campaign built around the power of the player’s name to promote the release of a new kit for its Player Mascot programme
Launched to leverage spiking tournament interest for the Round Of 16 wave of matches and to celebrate UEFA’s official payment’s partner’s long-term sponsorship of the competition’s child mascot initiative which sees kids walk out of the stadium tunnel holding hands with one of the players ahead of kickoff.
The integrated campaign is led by a hero video in which Messi learns about how many kids around the world have been named after him and meets some of these young Leos to hand out a personalised shirt from the new UCL player mascot uniform. It also sees Messi watch footage of their parents explaining why they named their children after him.
The ‘Passing On The Love Of Football. Priceless.’ Video dropped across TV and online platforms from 27 February.
A launch event saw the US finance and tech brand team up with Global Street Art for a giant 15m X 7m street-art mural in central Paris featuring Messi and the four young Leos he met.
Another strand of the Mastercard campaign – running in France, Germany and the UK – was a sweepstakes offering one lucky fan to walk onto the pitch alongside Messi at the FC Bayern München v Paris Saint-Germain FC game on 8 March.
The campaign kicked off the call-to-action targeting parents to participate in the programme and the content aimed to drive viewers online to visit Priceless.com to find out more about the player mascot experience.
“Sporting heroes possess a superpower, to inspire the next generation, and give them belief that they too can achieve greatness,” said Mastercard Senior VP Of Marketing and Communications Jeannette Liendo. “That’s why Mastercard is proud to be working with the UEFA Foundation and Messi to give young football fans, like the ones pictured on the mural, the opportunity to feel like the stars of the show.”
The campaign was informed by bespoke research and a brand poll which found that one in four (24%) of parents would consider naming their child ‘Leo’ citing his status as an exemplary role model as the reason why.
Messi himself added: “Playing football has been my life’s passion, and nothing brings me more joy than passing on my love for the beautiful game to the next generation. I look back at my own career and only hope that I can do the same for the talent of tomorrow, many of whom I will be cheering on in years to come.”
Comment
A bit of a tearjerker which sees Lionel Messi, a Mastercard ambassador since 2018, demonstrate the marketing power and pull linked to his name.
This activation adds further to Mastercard’s long-standing heritage of notable UCL and Player Mascot activations stretching from 2014’s ‘Deco’s Training Camp’ to 2022’s ‘Young Messi’s First Flight’ film.
Mastercard’s UCL Player Mascot initiative, run in harness with the World Food Programme, offers kids an experience of a lifetime. Entry spans paid-for and competition winners and the experience starts with an induction, transport to the stadium, a kit, meet-and-greet with players in the tunnel pre-game and then emerging from the tunnel out on to the pitch hand in hand with one of the players immediately ahead of kick-off and VIP match seats.
Mastercard is a long-standing sponsor of the UEFA Champions League: the world’s most prestigious and most watched annual club competition featuring the best 32 teams in Europe. This year’s tournament runs from June 2022 to the Final in Istanbul and May 2023.
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