Mastercard’s purpose is to connect everyone to Priceless Possibilities, and for decades the brand has been doing that in football, connecting millions to the beautiful game in the most memorable of ways. Mastercard has also been a long-standing sponsor of football and the UEFA Champion's League. However the year 2022 was the busiest season for football, with a certain global event taking precedence for football fans worldwide and at time of when consumer spending was forecast to increase, it was important for Mastercard to maintain strong levels of association with it.

Our challenge was twofold:

1. As a non-sponsor Mastercard faced restrictions on ground and could not really talk about football on the ground in a specific time period.

2. In a year of 24/7 football, we had to find a new and different way to connect fans to priceless possibilities in football and create something that would stand out.

So to avoid the restrictions on the ground, we took the game above the ground - all the way to the stratosphere - in zero gravity!

We hosted the world’s first football match in zero gravity, a ground-breaking stunt never-before seen or attempted.

We decided that this out-of-the-world match should be played by everyday people, so we used social media to scout and recruit passionate football fans from Qatar, Egypt and Brazil who told us what’s priceless to them about football. Once selected, each was invited, along with Luis Figo (a Mastercard ambassador), to take part in the world’s highest football match in zero gravity, the unlikeliest and most priceless football match of all time.

The idea was to not only create a record-breaking match but as labelled by reporters, "the most entertaining sporting event of the year".

Football transcends boundaries and unites people around the world. Mastercard, with its decades-long legacy in football, celebrated the world's love for the sport by hosting a record-breaking football game at 20,230ft in zero gravity. The game featured football legend Luis Figo and seven everyday heroes, earning Mastercard an official spot in the 2023 Guinness World Records. To build anticipation and generate headlines globally, we devised a three-pronged communications strategy across the pre-launch, launch, and post-launch phases. To drive talkability, we adopted a multi-layered approach, utilizing paid, earned, owned, and shared channels with hyper-localized content. Through a collaborative approach, we leveraged a global network to curate local stories and angles, engaged a broadcast partner to tailor b-roll footage, and used a global news wire to spread the news as far and wide as possible – highlighting the connection between the stories and Mastercard's mission to connect people to priceless possibilities.

Hence, while the world focused on the football stars on the ground, we picked unlikely heroes - 7 football fans from around the world using a social campaign.

We also engaged with Luis Figo to play with them in this priceless match. This way we created content that would resonate with fans globally and leverage.

We created a specially-engineered field abode an A310 aircraft which was designed for zero gravity with specially-sourced materials and planned the gameplay together with Guinness record officials, to have a continuous game on flight. We had a time keeper and a referee as well as specialised camera crew to capture the event uninterrupted.

This feat had to be achieved within a month, in order to go live before other global football events, and the media placements as well as PR were planned strategically so that it could be seen by as many people

The never-before-seen game got us never-before-seen recognition across the world. First, it earned a Guinness World Record for the highest altitude football match and within a month we achieved the following:

- 89m views (VTR rate 77%)

- 233m impressions

- Gross reach of 6.6 billion

- 1500 broadcast clips across news channels like BBC, Fox etc as well as sporting channels like ESPN and SkySports

- Over 5000 hits regionally and globally with coverage in Bloomberg, Reuters, The Guardian etc.

- ROI 44:1 - Earned $33m worth of media coverage with an investment of $750,000

But best of all, in a year of 24/7 football where brands were fighting for attention and cut-through, we owned the conversation before a ball was kicked: we gained 88% share of voice and, more importantly, we increased mentions of “Priceless” by 104%.

When football aimed to reach new heights, Mastercard took it out-of-this-world.