Keen, strategic insight…the kind that makes a business grow…that is the essence of a great creative idea, says Debra Coughlin, SVP of brand building for MasterCard. You might even say it's…priceless.

It is also the essence of a great marketing campaign -- MasterCard's five-year-old Priceless campaign -- now running in 45 languages and 90 countries.

More than five years ago, when a headhunter called about this opportunity at MasterCard, Debra was happily ensconced at J. Walter Thompson and really wasn't looking to make a change at all.

But this is what ran through her mind and caught her imagination: I thought, well, MasterCard is a fabulous, fabulous brand but, truly, I don't remember its advertising…I thought, wow, I know they spend a lot of money, but what they're doing is sort of unmemorable.

The challenge was to put the MasterCard business on the map on a worldwide basis with the U.S. really as a lead market. We were in a situation where we needed a really good idea quickly, Debra explains.

That meant that the agencies pitching the business had to come up with the idea that MasterCard would run with. That was a little scary. A little bit daunting. And the nail biting did not abate until the very last presentation, by McCann-Erickson, which was Priceless.

Debra recalls: McCann did a fabulous job of taking all of our business knowledge, research and information and then finding incredible insights. They came back with the way that consumers were thinking and a way to do something that would really differentiate MasterCard.

Having come from the agency side herself, Debra had all the more appreciation for what McCann had done. After graduating from Columbia Business School in 1982, she considered several different possibilities -- the banking industry, Wall Street, and consumer packaged goods. But what looked most exciting was advertising -- in fact, one particular place in advertising -- Young & Rubicam.

What Debra says she loved about Y&R was that they had positioned themselves as a strategic partner with their clients, as an agency that came up with creative solutions to make a business grow. She stayed at Y&R for about 13 years, working on the General Foods Jell-O accounts, as well as the launch of Advil.

She also worked in new business, logging Xerox, Holiday Inn and PBS in the "wins" column. Then she moved to the international side and worked on Colgate, on oral care, Colgate Total and hair care products. Colgate, she says, truly was leading the industry in marketing on the global side at the time. It was a great opportunity to see how the rest of the world operates.

She left Y&R to go to J. Walter Thompson, to work with a former boss who had become head of the New York office, on the Warner Lambert account. Did that for a while ... and then she got that phone call from that headhunter about this job at MasterCard.



What was it about Priceless that really made it so effective for MasterCard? What was the problem that it solved?

What we found was that people buy things because of how those things make them feel. You buy a motorcycle not necessarily for the speed, but for the way that the wind feels against your face. You buy a big screen TV because it's nice to have your whole family together watching something on television.

So the idea is that the item allows you to get to some other place in your life that makes you feel good. That's where McCann turned a lot of our information into a real insight. It was so refreshing to see a campaign that was truly based on consumer insight, that resonated.

Is that quality what made it so adaptable in so many markets or was it something else?

It is -- because people are people. The things that are important to people are pretty much the same worldwide -- it's your family, your community, or your well being at work. Those same themes resonate worldwide. It really is based on universal truth, which is what makes it work worldwide.

But we don't take executions from the U.S. and try to force them to work in other markets. We ask each market to take a look at the execution, talk to their consumers about it, bring it out to focus groups, do some quantitative testing. If it resonates and just has to be slightly adapted, that's great. If it is good insight but the execution isn't right, then we take the insight and we build a new execution around it. But if it doesn't work at all, we don't force it on anyone.

Were there any markets where Priceless was less effective or flat out didn't work?

Some markets worked better than others, but we didn't have any market where the campaign did not work. Anywhere where we run advertising now, we run Priceless. Up to 90 countries have embraced this campaign in 45 different languages. It just works.

So, after five years, how do you keep it fresh?

That is something that we work on every day, because when you have a good idea you don't want to let it go. The first thing is, we're always on top of consumers and what consumers are thinking about and what's important to them right now. In fact, we just completed a study called What Matters, where we went out to about 14 different markets and talked to consumers about what matters to them today. The result of that research is then reflected in the commercials that we develop.

We always look for new-news. Making sure that we balance news with emotion is really important to us. When we do new-news sorts, we throw in product news, promotion news, retailer acceptance news -- we look across all the things that may affect a consumer.

The executions also have to feel fresh. We are probably our biggest critics when we look at executions. We try to do things that are part of the popular culture. Priceless actually is now part of the popular culture -- people feel like they own Priceless and they're very demanding that we do good Priceless work. It's up to us to make sure that we continue to do that.

How do you make sure that your promotions and your other marketing activities deliver the same emotional punch as the advertising?

First of all, it is just how we are organized. We get all the parties involved to all work together and have shared objectives on the programs. We do a thing called "marketing mix," where we are able to tease out, through a series of regression analyses, how well our programs do for us, which ones deliver the most volume for us, and which media vehicles work best for us.

For example, a couple of years ago we created the Major League Baseball All-Century Team, and it really delivered. Our GDV -- Gross Dollar Volume, or the amount of volume that goes through on the cards -- grew dramatically.

So, we challenged our partner, Major League Baseball, to come up with a promotional platform that we could leverage. Out of that came, Memorable Moments, in which fans voted on the most memorable moments in baseball history. Then we ran a promotion that went along with it. Our advertising for the summer was basically dedicated to that. It launched at the All-Star Game, and Major League Baseball actually created a whole program behind it as part of the pre-game show. It was fabulous.

How does your online strategy fit into the scheme of things?

We integrate online with everything that we're doing. First of all, it is a media vehicle for us. Last year, we had a program that we called Priceless Edge. We wanted to enhance the bond that college kids would have with MasterCard. We wanted to give college kids a chance to get something that is so hard to get on their own -- an internship -- to actually help them jumpstart their careers.

There was no usage component or anything involved with this -- it was just a brand story. We went to college campuses and worked through their career counseling offices. We did a lot of grassroots things -- the online component of that was quite big.

We also offered young people the opportunity to take an online course on the music industry. Based on an essay contest, 50 kids were chosen for a five-week course in the music industry down in Nashville. They received hands-on experience working with some of the best people in the business. They learned what it was like to be an agent, a lawyer and a marketer in the music business.

A dozen kids were chosen by the faculty to work on an episode of Music in High Places. But it wasn't the typical intern thing, which is, just get me coffee. They had real jobs within this production and at the end got a letter of recommendation from the production company. Out of the original 50 kids, between five and ten actually got jobs within the music business.

Kind of like American Idol, but from the other side of the console.

Exactly. And you'll see this year we're spinning that idea out to baseball, with the Priceless Edge Sports Experience. On all of our promotions, you come to MasterCard.com to find out more about them. We had a great World Cup promotion where you could go online and basically play different countries against one another.

We also use it as a vehicle to get our offers out there. We have what we call MasterCard Exclusives Online -- we refer to it as MEO. You sign up for MEO and then we will email you information about different deals and offers.

Also, if for some reason you don't get a solicitation for a credit card, we have a section where you can go on and apply for a card. We actually have a lot of people coming to MasterCard to find out where they can get a card. So the Internet plays a lot of different roles for us.

Your brand team is spread out all over the world. How do you make sure that they're all on the same page and working together as effectively as possible?

Having a great brand positioning is the best way to pay off everything that matters. I have a team of people here who are divided up by regions and they have country responsibilities. They work directly with our key countries on developing their marketing programs. So we actually sign off on marketing plans with our key markets.

In addition, the U.S. group reports into global marketing, which I am part of, and the U.S. group reports to me. So, basically, we oversee the key marketing in all of the major countries with the U.S. group and the whole marketing team also reports directly to me. No piece of Priceless work, television or print, gets produced without it being seen by the creative director at McCann in New York, as well as by my key team and myself. We have very tight control of what's produced.

How do you communicate?

We have an extranet, called McWisdom, which is something that we use with McCann-Erickson. Also, internally, we use e-mails a lot -- always back and forth with emails! And when new work is produced it goes out through the McCann system -- out of McWisdom -- which our local offices and the McCann offices have access to.

Then I have someone here who's in charge of global sharing. She sends out notes to all of our key markets to say, "Here's new work in development, take a look. If it's something you're interested in let us know. Contact your global person so that we can make sure we accommodate your needs."

How do you encourage creativity and innovation within your team?

We're very idea focused. We tend not to say, no. We tend to say, give it a shot. And maybe it's because a lot of us came from the agency side, where if something feels like a good idea, you experiment with it.

My feeling is that you hire good marketers because they have good brains, and you put those brains to work. It's not just about how we look at the numbers. It's -- where's the insight? Where's the next new idea? How can you take an idea and make it real? When an idea comes up that's good, we rally around it and get the right people in the organization behind it to make it happen. You've got to give people room.

How much life do you think is left in the Priceless campaign?

I think a long time. If we carefully work with it and manage it, it should last for a very long time. We'll know when it starts to wear out because we have so many measurements in place that show us when it starts to wear out.

Actually, with all the testing that we're doing, the scores are bigger and better than ever before. Right now our commercials are working twice as hard as any other commercial in the marketplace, and we will continue to do that.

Anytime we see anything that may suggest some softness, we go directly in and say, how do we fix it? It's hard to come up with a great campaign. It's our responsibility to keep it great. It's also fun -- actually a great luxury -- to work on a campaign that's really good and keeps getting better.