How McCann Poland and Mastercard reached people during a crisis
In the aftermath of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, 8 million citizens fled to neighbouring countries – chief among them Poland. Among those who drove to the border to help these migrants was McCann Poland Group CEO Wojciech Borowski, and others from his team, who brought Ukrainians into their homes and heard their stories. They began to wonder if there was a way to adapt the Mastercard app McCann Poland had created during Covid – which showed safe places to shop – as a way of helping these refugees find stable places to relocate.
This was the birth of WhereToSettle: an app developed in just a few short weeks by Mastercard and McCann Poland in the most extreme circumstances. It aggregates data from Mastercard transactions, employment records and real estate listings, pinpointing towns in Poland where jobs exist, shopping can be done and homes can be found. Like many countries, Poland suffers from a brain drain, with millions moving from towns to bigger cities or abroad. At the same time, millions of traumatised migrants were congregating in Poland’s major cities – exactly the places where facilities are most stretched. WhereToSettle helped bridge this gap.
“They began to wonder if there was a way to adapt the MasterCard app McCann Poland had created during Covid – which showed safe places to shop – as a way of helping these refugees find stable places to relocate.”
Ultimately, a quarter of all refugees that stayed in the country – 1.5 million people – used the app. Economically, this overall growth in population increased Poland’s GDP by an estimated 3%.
This is an extraordinary project, developed and launched during an extraordinary historical moment, with interesting and applicable takeaways for how other communication professionals can use a human approach to data.
Just as important is the depth of experience with a client, their brand and their goals. With years of working together, the team instinctively understood how Mastercard could intervene, which helped the project move at the pace of breaking news, rather than the usual sign-off speed. For all its deeply laudable goals and effects, this is, after all, a project by an advertising agency and a multinational corporation – a relationship that is key to its success.
“One of the things that made it so special is that everything we did is totally in line with Mastercard’s philosophy and DNA,” Borowski says, “which is based on two pillars. The first is to use data for good, which obviously happened here, and second is financial inclusion, which also happened here. Everyone understood that we were aligned with what Mastercard deeply believes and represents, and I think that that's what really made it work. If we were doing something that was outside of the DNA of the company, or the philosophy of the way it functions, it would have been almost impossible. We were basically working on realising the mission of Mastercard, within extreme conditions.”