Case Study
Mastercard: Local Favourites
B2B
To assist Mastercard and Carat in their campaign to encourage small businesses to introduce a Zero Minimum spend policy for all card transactions.
Consumer
Mastercard and Carat also asked Time Out to help empower consumers to lobby businesses to have zero minimums.
The idea
Time Out in partnership with Mastercard celebrated the city’s local favourites – the little businesses, with zero minimums – that make our lives better, brighter, and most of all easier.
The search for 'Local Favourites'
Time Out incorporated Mastercard’s Zero Minimum campaign into our Food Awards, creating three new People’s Choice categories that encouraged our readers to nominate their favourite small food businesses under the categories ‘Best Takeaway Coffee’, ‘Best Takeaway Lunch Spot’ and ‘Best late night snack vendor’. The kicker? Because we were celebrating customer first businesses, only those with zero card minimums could be nominated. We built a micro-site to run the nomination and voting process. Then, on the night of the Food Awards in Sydney and Melbourne, the three small businesses who garnered the most votes won a food award.
The Local Favourites Guide
Of course, it’s not just pre-made food vendors that can benefit from having no minimums.
To further reward the small businesses that are already doing the right thing, and have no card minimums, we created ‘Local favourites’ guides in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, celebrating the best small businesses across the categories of News Agencies, Bakeries, Coffee Shops, Providores, Butchers, Late Night Snack Vendors, Takeaway Lunch Spots, Bookshops and Small Bars – all with brand new photography to accompany them.
These guides were promoted across print and online. All businesses selected were handpicked by Time Out’s team of critics for their outstanding offerings and commitment to customer service.
Platforms activated
Custom built microsite
For ‘Local Favourites’
Food Award Nominations
Live events
New categories in the Time Out Food Awards
Time Out magazines
Ongoing native content series in Time Out magazine, celebrating Local Favourites
Time Out website
1 bespoke ‘Local Favourites’ feature package per city, with dozens of new small business venue listings inside it. Plus integration into the Food Awards winners coverage
Time Out newsletter
12 newsletter tiles over the course of the campaign
Facebook
Social-led nomination drive, followed by targeted native content campaign seeded on Facebook
Instagram
Coverage through Time Out Sydney’s Instagram account, including one Story.
Twitter
Integration into the Food Awards winners coverage
Third party promotion
Featured in all third party media after the Food Awards
The Results
-
day event, with 5 supporting activations within the Hop-Up
-
Estimated footfall to World Square throughout the duration of the campaign
-
beers poured
-
paying attendees
-
copies of Time Out Sydney magazine
-
active subscribers reached, with over 74,000+ individual newsletters sent throughout the campaign
-
estimated reach through third-party promotion
-
Page Views at 1 min 48 sec average page duration
“To leverage our Zero Minimum campaign, we partnered with Time Out for their annual Food Awards. The support of the whole Time Out team was phenomenal. The additional awareness and reach Time Out obtained for us was priceless!”
Andrew Cartwright
SVP & Country Manager, Mastercard Australia
What can we do for you?