Mastercard seeks to balance qual smiles and quant statistics

Stephen Whiteside

Mastercard, the payments company, is seeking to strike the right balance between big data and more qualitiative indicators as it strives to engage consumers.

Raja Rajamannar has a simple question for the data obsessives who want to turn marketing into a number-crunching business.

"How do you measure the value of a smile that you bring to the consumer's face when you advertise?" Rajamannar, the chief marketing and communications officer at payments company MasterCard, asked during a session hosted by The Economist magazine at CES 2018.

Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Mastercard

Expressed in a more thoroughgoing manner, he suggested that it may not be easy for brands to prove the return on investment (ROI) yielded from this kind of engagement,...

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