With Priceless Clan, Mastercard used Saudi Arabia's most popular online games and gaming content platforms (like Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok) to establish a deep and meaningful connection with gamers during the biggest gaming event in the world.

Our million-dollar gaming partnership wasn’t usable, so Mastercard found a way to create a community in games that it couldn’t contractually be in. The brand created the biggest un-official gaming squad in the ME, transforming thousands of gamer avatars/names into media for the brand.

We flooded platforms with a red-and-yellow swarm and turned our failed campaign into a major engagement play.

Saudi Arabia has emerged as a major hub for esports and gaming. The value of the country’s market in this space hit $1 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $6.8 billion by 2030.

In fact, a recent study found that there are now over 23 million gamers in Saudi Arabia, making up around 67% of the country's population. In addition, streaming is incredibly popular in the region, with an estimated 4.4 million gaming fans watching thousands of Arabic-language Twitch streams – year-on-year.

In 2018, Mastercard announced a multi-year partnership with Riot Games to become the first global sponsor for League of Legends, the largest PC game in the world. Since then, Mastercard has been strengthening its relationship with 18-24 GenZ’ers, building brand affinity and creating a stronger association with gamers.

So, when Saudi Arabia announced the biggest gaming event in the world - Gamers8 - it was clear we were going to leverage our partnership to drive engagement, utilizing this passion point to break in.

Only, Gamers8 announced that League of Legends was not going to be part of the tournament. Our developed campaign died, but the objectives stayed the same: to win the hearts and minds of Saudis aged 18-24, increasing social engagements (vs 6% benchmark), campaign view-thru rates (vs 29% benchmark) and brand love amongst the target audience.

League of Legends was our doorway into the gaming world. So, when that failed, we had to build ourselves new doors - quickly. And that’s how we came up with the #PricelessClan, the largest unofficial gaming squad in the world.

Every team has a name and squad colours. So, to join our clan, gamers needed to add “priceless” to their names, customize their avatars with the brand colours and share a screenshot.

By doing this, they became a part of our team, unlocking freebies and tickets to the event. And just like that: we hacked our grass-roots community into most gaming titles.

With Priceless Clan, we found a “work around” for our contractual obligations while encouraging thousands of un-paid brand engagements. A red-and-yellow squad flooded every battleground, making Mastercard a player in the gaming sphere.

Mastercard sees gaming as a gateway to engage with 18–24-year individuals. And since the Gamers8 festival was happening in Saudi, we had a great opportunity to engage with them during the event.

But how could we connect with a community that dislikes brands – especially after we lost our right to leverage League of Legends?

Through research, we identified two of the most common gamer habits: customization and squad-building. Realizing that most of them formed tight-knit bonds while playing, customizing their avatars to wear the same colours and using a name to brand their squad.

Here, we saw an opportunity to connect with gamers, helping them enhance their community experience and develop stronger ties with our brand.

To jumpstart the idea, we partnered with some of the Kingdom’s biggest Twitch streamers, @SHoNgxBong (1.7M followers), @Nitrake (440k followers), @Cipher (189K followers), and @lilwhuda (393k followers, inviting them to be the first members of the Priceless Clan.

Combined, 20 creators streamed for over 18 times, customizing their characters, adding priceless to their names, and playing as one of our team members. During the sessions, they invited viewers and fellow players to join in, setting the recruitment process in full motion.

As the event started, millions had already watched our clan members live on Twitch, Discord, TikTok, Youtube and Facebook, taking up the challenge and joining the Priceless Clan themselves.

We transformed a failed campaign into the brand’s highest gaming engagement in the region.

With 1.9M+ minutes of content combined

834K unique viewers

87+ minutes of brand exposure per viewer

3.7M social engagements

37% engagement rate (vs 6% benchmark)

31% view-thru rate (vs 29% benchmark)

320K unpaid branded avatars

Gamers, themselves, became media for Mastercard in dozens of virtual worlds.