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Summit Heads: Mastercard marketing executive VP says traditional advertising is ‘no longer really working’
Ahead of her CMO Masterclass at this week's Finance Marketing Summit, Julie Nestor, executive vice president, head of marketing and communications, Asia Pacific, Mastercard, sat down with Mumbrella to preview the event.
Julie Nestor, the executive vice president, head of marketing and communications, Asia Pacific, Mastercard, is set to deliver a CMO masterclass at Mumbrella’s Finance Marketing Summit in Sydney this week.
In her session, Nestor will take the audience behind-the-scenes of the brand’s industry-leading approach to inclusive marketing that celebrates people’s differences while building a stronger business.
We sat down with Nestor to chat all about it.
Marketers within the financial services industry are navigating choppy waters. How are you staying focused on the customer experience?
Regardless of what’s going on from a macro perspective, companies and brands are always thinking about what’s important to their customer and how to design experiences that are going to increase value to the end user.
And at Mastercard, our way to engage consumers is through delivering priceless experiences that align to their passions. Priceless has been around for 27 years and it started as a advertising tagline for things that money can’t buy. It was all about priceless experiences and people wanting to experience time with their family and friends and that’s more important than buying things. And really over the last 27 years, we’ve evolved that from an ad campaign to an experience platform.
And that experience platform is really centered around 10 key consumer passions that include arts and culture, sports, shopping, gaming, culinary, and more. As the network that supports the banks, we work in partnership with the banks to understand what their customers want and what they’re passionate about, and then we work together to build assets around that.
I think a great example would be Australians’ passion for music and festivals. Now that the world has emerged from COVID, when all those experiences stopped and were missing from people’s lives – Mastercard has partnered with Live Nation, the biggest tour promoter globally, to bring priceless experiences around music to our cardholders in Australia and around the world.
Julie Nestor
As you are leading marketing and communications for a global brand in Asia Pacific, how do you balance diverse cultures and maintaining a cohesive brand message?
Our purpose as a company is to bring everybody into the financial ecosystem and make sure nobody is excluded from that. We do a lot of work – which you’ll hear about when I present – around making sure that people are included in the ecosystem. So there’s that part of ambition and purpose. And then there’s Priceless, which is going a step further and saying, ‘How do we actually truly engage with consumers?’ Because traditional marketing and advertising, it’s no longer really working.
You think about consumers just being bombarded every day with up to 5,000 messages. So for us, we need to engage through different ways.
Even when the financial environment is tough, or interest rates are high, our priceless experiences take many forms. It’s not necessarily about being expensive or offering experiences only for the affluent segment.
So in Australia, for example, we have a number of priceless experiences that involve learning about First Nations culture and experiencing their life and spending time with people on the land. So it’s a very diverse range of experiences that we can provide to consumers.
What are the insights you hope attendees of the Finance Marketing Summit take with them?
The session is going to be about how marketers can take the lead in driving societal impact through inclusive marketing. We think about how do we bring people into a digital and financial ecosystem from which they might be excluded today – segments of people with various disabilities, for example.
So what I want to talk about is some of the projects that we’ve worked on that drive business outcome, while also doing good.
As marketers, we have the pleasure and the privilege to design products, initiatives, services and marketing campaigns for the consumer. In many cases, marketing knows more about the consumer than any other function in the organisation. So with that comes a responsibility to design products, services and campaigns for different demographics and to think about how you can be more inclusive in your marketing.
I hope [the audience] will take away that it’s not just marketing campaign work. A lot of the work that we’ve done is actually building platforms and tools that can really change people’s lives.
My message is to think about what you can solve for some of these societal issues. You might feel like it’s one step away from your brand, but quite often, it’s the private sector that needs to help drive some of these initiatives.
What are you looking forward to the most at this year’s Finance Marketing Summit?
Reconnecting with friends in the industry and hearing from the other great speakers on important topics like engaging with Gen Z.
The Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit takes place 25 July, 2024 at 12-Micron Sydney. Get your tickets here.
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Neil Griffiths is the Managing Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the company in October 2023.
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