For Pride month in 2022, Mastercard® sought to continue its longstanding support of the LGBTQIA+ community through “Your True Self is Priceless,”, an omnichannel campaign designed to celebrate the power that comes from embracing and living as your authentic self.

The brand’s commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community is supported by the release of the ‘True Name’ card - which allows transgender and non-binary cardholders to use their chosen name, rather than their legal name on the card which is designed to provide a more inclusive and safe commerce experience.

Mastercard aimed to demonstrate innovation, inclusion leadership, and increase engagement with the LGBTQIA+ community and connect with a new generation of consumers, through the delivery of ‘passion based’ experiences. 

Traditional in-person Pride festivities were not accessible to many across the globe. So Mastercard looked towards a solution that could be accessible by anyone, anywhere, while encouraging authenticity.

Mastercard Pride Plaza was designed for the LGBTQIA+ community and allies. Regardless of their Web3 knowledge, we ensured that we created thorough on-boarding mechanics and easy-to-understand resources even for Web3 newbies to jump into the Metaverse with us.

Our first focus was to bring in Mastercard’s internal Pride BRG leads as well as long term charity partner GLAAD, to help guide our development and decisions, ensuring that an authentic, community- driven space was built.

There were various events and interactive features including:

- A Stage to host panels from LGBTQIA+ thought leaders

- “Letters to my younger self” a gallery of community handwritten heartfelt messages of encouragement to themselves, during an earlier, challenging moment of their lives

- ‘Digital twins’ of our real-world global Pride Parade Floats in collaboration with notable artists

- Free limited edition Wearables collection designed by 5 artists created to empower self-expression

- more

Mastercard Pride Plaza was hosted on a 6x5 parcel of land in Decentraland (64 x 80 meter) multi-level, open-air build with a forum, cinema, wearables boutique, community center, gallery, float park, and priceless surprises. Each space housed LGBTQIA+ creatives, charities, or resources for the community from across 5 regions, a truly global experience.

Over the course of two months, we partnered with Mastercard to develop the vision and later tapped Land Vault to help bring the creative concept to life.

Everything from design language and color schemes to ambient sound design to incorporate Mastercard’s Sonic Branding throughout.

On-boarding and safety was paramount for the development so we included roaming character bots to help answer any questions visitors might have.We also rented billboards across the Metaverse to advertise Mastercard Pride Plaza, with a first of its kind teleporter billboard, bringing in more ‘foot traffic’ to the space.

The results were excellent, with over 157k unique visitors, in the plaza and Decentraland parade / NYC Pride float experience, an astonishing dwell time of over 10 minutes in the Plaza, significantly over delivering on our engagement goal. 10,000 Mastercard branded wearables were acquired.

Over 35 countries visited the Plaza, achieving global reach, appeared in over 164 media publications and was voted by Ad Age as the Number 1 Pride Metaverse activation.

Our collaborative wearable art pieces with artist Orly Anan was awarded 1 silver and 1 bronze at “Círculo de Oro” the prestige creative award in Mexico.

On social it accrued 14 million impressions and 140k engagements (85% above avg engagement rate).

More importantly, the Pride Plaza led the way in creating an inclusive, open and positive experience that enabled everyone to attend as themselves, because being able to be your True Self, in the Metaverse is Priceless™.