MasterCard Miyamo

Thanks to its long-standing Priceless campaign, MasterCard enjoyed high brand awareness and affinity. As a processor of transactions, it had a lot of data about consumers. But it had never created a direct relationship with them. In a climate of brands moving beyond advertising to provide tangible value to people, MasterCard asked for our help. They needed us to bridge the gap and focus on their future consumer, Millennials, using their love of music as a starting point.

Through several phases of discovery and design, we seized on a deceptively simple insight: Millennials loved to share over social media and they defined themselves by the music they loved. But they had no intuitive way to capture their unique music taste and share it with their friends. So we developed MIYAMO. It keeps track of what you listen to and creates your unique personal music ID, giving everyone a new way to socially express, compare and discover new music.

MIYAMO quickly became Mexico’s #1 free music app and the 2nd most popular free app in the iTunes store. As a key component of Priceless Music, MIYAMO helped MasterCard advance its business in Mexico, including 270,000 new card signups from a single issuer, a tenfold increase in awareness of Priceless Music, and strong upward movement in Net Promoter Score and key brand health measures.

The MIYAMO name – inspired by the Spanish words for “My name” – was borne out of the idea that your music announces who you are. It reflects the personalization inherent in the MIYAMO platform. The music ID design was inspired by two central insights: first, the MasterCard logo’s ‘wedge’ shape, which shows two things always coming together around something in common; and second, a blooming flower, to showcase the organic nature of music.

In addition to making your iTunes library social, we added a special Facebook app called MIYAMO playback, that allowed the MIYAMO experience to continue on the world’s top social network. The more music you listened to, the more ID customizations you would unlock. This was key to really deliver on the promise of a music ID that is truly unique to each user. The design decisions were also enhanced by concurrent user research that ensured we arrived at a design as well as an experience that was intuitive, beautiful and felt true to people’s passion about the music they listen to.