The Mastercard Priceless promotion with the Chicago Cubs was a development project completed while consulting with R/GA, a New York-based digital agency handling the Mastercard Priceless campaign account. The promotion tied the Mastercard brand to the Chicago Cubs, connecting the Priceless campaign platform to a baseball partnership.
The technical implementation centered on a custom card creation tool — an interactive web application that allowed visitors to generate personalized downloadable cards as part of the promotion. This mechanic, where users create a custom branded artifact that can be saved or shared, provides an interactive engagement layer beyond passive content consumption and gives the campaign a social distribution mechanism when users share their creations.
The application was built using the CodeIgniter PHP MVC framework, the same approach used in the concurrent Mastercard Beyoncé promotion handled through R/GA. Server-side image manipulation libraries handled the dynamic generation of the personalized card output, composing user inputs or selections with Cubs and Mastercard brand assets into a downloadable image file.
The lead generation function of the campaign was integrated into the card creation flow, capturing user data as part of the interactive experience and connecting it to Mastercard's campaign analytics and follow-up infrastructure. Building two promotional applications with the same technical stack through the same agency engagement allowed for shared development patterns between the Beyoncé and Cubs promotions while producing distinct campaign experiences aligned with each partnership.
