MasterCard Priceless Cities Woos Yankees Fans in New York

As part of MasterCard Worldwide’s iconic "Priceless" campaign, the brand has created a New York-based promotional event for its Priceless Cities in-market branding campaign.

Given that it's summer in the Big Apple, Priceless New York centers around — what else? — the New York Yankees, creating a game for baseball fans to play by hiding Yankee’s seats throughout the city in partnership with Facebook Places.

Find the chairs and check-in via Facebook Places to be eligible to win special prizes, including meet-and-greets with Yankee greats, a “safari sleepover” at the Bronx Zoo, “V.I.P. treatment” at Marcus Samuelsson's red-hot Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem, and access to a new section of Yankee Stadium known as Batter’s Eye View – which includes a MasterCard Batter’s Eye Cafe.

Priceless Cities highlights travel, sports, shopping, culinary or arts and entertainment for card-holders, positioned at “consumer passion points,” and accompanied by a new microsite, MasterCard.com/PricelessNY, to aggregate users' tweets, Facebook pictures and YouTube videos  from the events.

It’s part of a broader effort to capitalize on geo-targeted discounts, deals and special offers proliferating in the local marketing space opened up by companies like Groupon and LivingSocial.

However, executives at MasterCard Worldwide say the initiative is not centered on percent-off deals or coupons, but rather, presents ‘priceless’ opportunities to card-holders.

Priceless Cities is intended to be “a real evolution of our brand promise,” Cheryl Guerin, SVP and group head for U.S. marketing at MasterCard Worldwide, commented to the New York Times.

The aim is to “put a little more ‘Priceless’ in [customer’s] lives,” she added, and to establish “functional differentiation” between MasterCard and competitors by “delivering tangible benefits” for users.

Additional American cities will be added this year, while the campaign will go global in 2012, supported by an integrated marketing communications platform that includes print, out of home, radio, television and digital.

McCann Erickson New York worked with director Tom Hooper, winner of multiple Best Director honors for The King's Speech and Oscar-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro to create the New York Priceless spot.

As seen at top, MasterCard's "New Friends" spot is now running on TV. The description: "A young guy walks around New York City doing something very priceless — whomever he sees wearing anything 'Yankees' he gives a ticket to the new MasterCard Batter's Eye seats at Yankee Stadium. At the game, everyone who received a ticket is there and gives the young man a standing ovation as he happily looks at his new friends at the seats."