Mastercard launched their Contactless “tap” transaction technology in 2013, but four years of continuous advertising had failed to make an impact and 76% of New Zealanders didn’t tap. Ever. New Zealand was simply a nation of card-inserting PIN punchers…and they didn’t see any reason to change.

The campaign objective was simple: get all of New Zealand tapping.

To change the transaction behaviour of an entire nation, we made tapping more than just a way to pay, but a matter of town pride. Tap For Your Town gave all New Zealanders the opportunity to bring former All Blacks captain (and living legend of rugby) Richie McCaw out of retirement to play a game of touch rugby against their town’s local team, on their local ground.

The rules were simple: the town with the most taps would win.

 

A fully-integrated campaign kicked off a tapping frenzy. For 10 weeks we monitored the real-time tapping data and social media sentiment of 66 New Zealand towns, fuelling the fierce local rivalries with town-targeted creative and social shout-outs from Richie himself, making tapping the talk of the town…in every town.

 

Queenstown emerged victorious with an incredible 11.2 taps per capita, and on the 28^th October, Richie’s hand-selected team took on the Queenstown locals in a game broadcast to 480,000 New Zealanders on Facebook Live.

 

Richie’s team won the game 11-10 in a thrilling overtime victory, but that was far from the only fantastic result. Tap For Your Town reached 97% of the population and created 13 million taps in just 10 weeks…an increase of 48% year on year. These results are projected to deliver over 10 million additional tap transactions across next 12 months, equating to some NZD$212 million of value to Mastercard.