How MasterCard and McCann Poland Turned Google Assistant Into Babcia's Shopping Companion
MasterCard's "Ok, Babcia, SafeWaze2Shop" campaign, created by McCann Poland and published in December 2020, repurposed Google Voice Assistant as a live experiential platform to make digital payments more accessible and trustworthy for older Polish consumers, particularly grandmothers, by connecting generations through a familiar voice-activated interface during the pandemic holiday period.
The campaign operates as two related but distinct activations. "Ok, Babcia" — Polish for "Ok, Grandmother" — connected younger people searching for traditional Polish recipes with isolated older relatives through Google Assistant, transforming a routine voice query into a moment of intergenerational contact and commerce education. "Safe Waze 2 Shop" extended the same strategic logic by integrating MasterCard's secure payment messaging into the navigation app Waze, guiding users toward safer shopping experiences. Together, the two executions form a single creative platform built around MasterCard's core proposition: that secure, user-friendly payment technology should adapt to people, not the reverse.
In Poland, the campaign launched during a period of accelerated digital adoption driven by pandemic-era restrictions that pushed consumers of all ages toward online commerce. The geographic specificity matters here. McCann Poland, operating from Warsaw, crafted both activations for a domestic audience where the cultural figure of the "babcia" carries genuine emotional weight, and where the gap between digitally confident younger consumers and less connected older generations represented a real, addressable tension for a payments brand. The experiential medium — a hijacked voice assistant rather than a conventional advertisement — was chosen precisely because it made MasterCard's technology claim tangible rather than declarative, giving the brand's promise of security and simplicity a form audiences could experience directly.
MasterCard identified a specific human truth at the centre of both campaigns. The figure of the Polish grandmother — the "babcia" — represents a generation that remained largely outside the digital commerce ecosystem even as e-commerce accelerated sharply across Poland and wider European markets during 2020. Rather than addressing this gap with instructional messaging or product-led communication, McCann Poland translated it into an experiential moment that made connection and safety feel personal rather than transactional.
The strategic insight is precise: older Polish consumers were not resistant to digital payments out of indifference but out of unfamiliarity and distrust. By routing MasterCard's secure-payment message through Google Assistant — a platform many older users had already encountered through their grandchildren — the campaign borrowed the credibility of an existing trusted technology to introduce a new behaviour. This approach reflects the longer arc of the MasterCard and McCann partnership, which began in 1997 when McCann created the original Priceless campaign, establishing the principle that some experiences matter more than the price of the transaction, according to communicateonline.me. That same philosophy anchors Ok, Babcia: the experience of connection with a grandmother is the Priceless moment; MasterCard's payment security is what makes it possible.
In Poland, the competitive context for payments brands intensified through 2020 as Visa and domestic fintech challengers expanded their consumer-facing digital offerings. Against this backdrop, MasterCard's decision to lead with cultural empathy rather than feature comparison was a deliberate differentiator. The campaign did not position MasterCard against Visa on transaction speed or reward structures; it positioned the brand as the payments partner that understood what digital adoption actually felt like for real Polish families. The experiential format, delivered through McCann Poland's Warsaw team, gave that positioning a form that press coverage and award juries could evaluate as craft rather than claim.
McCann Poland engineered both executions around a single creative mechanism: the repurposing of an existing consumer technology platform to carry MasterCard's message in a context where no advertisement was expected. The act of "hijacking" Google Voice Assistant — the campaign's own framing, as documented by Clapboard — is itself the creative idea, not merely its delivery vehicle. When a younger Polish user asked Google Assistant for a traditional recipe, the assistant connected them to an actual grandmother who could provide it, collapsing the distance between digital convenience and human warmth in a single interaction.
The production credits for the Ok, Babcia and SafeWaze2Shop campaigns are publicly documented. Executive creative directors on the project were Marcin Sosiński, Pierre Lipton, and Josh Stein, according to Clapboard. Creative directors were Bartek Klimaszewski, Mike Shuman, and Gail Pak, with Klimaszewski named as the submitting creative director for the campaign. Art direction was led by Janka Szwykowska, and copywriting was handled by Łukasz Kołakowski and Zbigniew Marczak, per Clapboard. Designer Anna Soliany also contributed to the visual identity of the campaign materials.
The PR film produced for Ok, Babcia — documented in the campaign archive with a publication date of May 2021 and recorded in Polish — functions as a case study artefact that captures the experiential activation for audiences who did not encounter it in market. The choice to publish the PR film in Polish rather than produce an English-language version for international awards circuits signals that the campaign's primary accountability was to its domestic audience in Poland, a relatively rare discipline in work that subsequently achieved significant international recognition. The Safe Waze 2 Shop execution applied the same philosophy to a navigation context, inserting MasterCard's secure-shopping guidance into journeys Waze users were already taking, making the brand's presence feel useful rather than interruptive.
The Ok, Babcia and SafeWaze2Shop campaigns earned substantive recognition across multiple international award programmes in 2021. Safe Waze 2 Shop received a Gold and a Bronze at the Epica Awards 2021 — Gold in Online and Mobile Services, Bronze in Media Innovation for Traditional Media — according to the Epica Awards. Ok, Babcia received a Silver at the Epica Awards 2021 in Online and Mobile Services, also per the Epica Awards. At the New York Festivals, Ok, Babcia earned a Bronze in the Financial category for Use of Discipline and Medium in Corporate Image, while Safe Waze 2 Shop earned a Bronze in Financial Consumer and in Social and Environmental Good, as documented by Radio Newyorkfestivals.
No verified third-party performance data measuring consumer reach, transaction uplift, or brand-preference shift for these campaigns is publicly available beyond the award citations. What the award record does confirm is that the work was evaluated and recognised by independent international juries across both creative craft and media innovation categories — a combination that indicates the executions succeeded on both conceptual and technical terms. The Epica Gold for Safe Waze 2 Shop in Online and Mobile Services is particularly significant given the competitive depth of that category in 2021.
Structurally, the campaigns demonstrate effectiveness principles that are measurable at a qualitative level. The use of an existing, trusted consumer platform — Google Assistant — as the activation medium reduced the barrier to engagement for a demographic that might have ignored a conventional MasterCard advertisement. The intergenerational mechanic created earned media potential that a product-feature campaign would not have generated. Clapboard assigns the Ok, Babcia SafeWaze2Shop campaign a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting solid creative ambition and meaningful award validation set against limited publicly available consumer outcome data.
MasterCard's Ok, Babcia campaign, created by McCann Poland in December 2020, repurposed Google Voice Assistant to connect younger Polish users seeking traditional recipes with real grandmothers. The activation used intergenerational connection to communicate MasterCard's commitment to secure, accessible digital payments for all age groups in Poland.
McCann Poland, based in Warsaw, created both campaigns for MasterCard. Executive creative directors were Marcin Sosiński, Pierre Lipton, and Josh Stein. Creative directors included Bartek Klimaszewski, Mike Shuman, and Gail Pak. The campaigns were published in December 2020 and submitted to international award programmes in 2021, per Clapboard.
Safe Waze 2 Shop won Gold in Online and Mobile Services and Bronze in Media Innovation at the 2021 Epica Awards, according to the Epica Awards. It also received a Bronze at the New York Festivals in the Financial Consumer and Social and Environmental Good categories, as documented by radio.newyorkfestivals.com. Ok, Babcia won Epica Silver and a New York Festivals Bronze.
MasterCard, through McCann Poland, engineered an activation within Google Assistant so that when younger Polish users requested traditional recipes, the assistant connected them to real grandmothers who could provide them. This mechanic made MasterCard's secure-payment technology the enabler of a genuine human interaction, giving the brand's digital-trust message an experiential rather than declarative form.
Clapboard assigns the Ok, Babcia SafeWaze2Shop campaign a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's creative ambition, its innovative use of Google Voice Assistant as an experiential medium, and its international award recognition, balanced against the absence of publicly verified consumer performance data for the Polish market activation.
McCann Poland identified older Polish consumers, particularly grandmothers, as a generation underserved by digital payment communications. Rather than using instructional messaging, the agency built an experiential activation around the culturally significant figure of the babcia, making MasterCard's secure-payment proposition feel personally relevant and emotionally grounded for families navigating digital commerce in Poland during 2020.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
