Click to Pay Capitals

Within five years, Mastercard wants to have eliminated the need for consumers to manually type in their card numbers when shopping online and introduce tokenisation, whereby sensitive details are replaced by a secure ‘token’ allowing payments to be processed safely.

Tokenisation means a faster, simpler and more secure online checkout experience for consumers. It’s a one-click solution. But it is not a subject that is easily understood. So Mastercard needed to create a campaign that brought the issue to life.

It kicked off in February 2005 with a pan-European survey of 18,000 consumers, uncovering their payment attitudes and behaviours. This revealed that nine in ten were typing out all their details when shopping online, and more than half were irritated by the need to create an account at checkout.

The survey also revealed that Brits take just under three minutes to enter their address and payment details online, totalling more than three hours a year for, an average, 66 shopping sessions.

And nowhere is the issue more acute than for residents of towns with unusually long names, like Poland’s Międzybrodzie Żywieckie, Skinnskatteberg in Sweden and Wales’ 58-letter tongue twister Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Mastercard identified seven towns in Europe with sesquipedalian names, declaring them Click to Pay Capitals. These communities became some of the first in Europe to try out tokenisation. Working with local residents, ranging from shopkeepers to mayors, Mastercard created a series of films and photographs that highlighted their frustrations at living in places where writing or typing the name is a challenge.

These residents became the storytellers as Mastercard worked with them to act as ambassadors for the technology, driving adoption through education and a series of on-the-ground activities.

The campaign, which rolled out across seven European countries, featured tailored releases in both national and local media, achieving more than 350 items of coverage and earning Mastercard 83 per cent of the conversation on digital payments

More importantly, enrolment to Click to Pay rose. Almost half of all ‘card not present’ transactions in Europe are now tokenised.

The judges described the entry as ‘smart and well written, ticking the box for covering all the details in an energetic, engaging way’. They were impressed by the stories of ‘normal people, from different backgrounds showcasing the personal and economic benefits of having a faster and simpler way to pay’.

Agency: The Academy