Mastercard Vibes

Earlier this year, Mastercard debuted its sonic brand identity, a comprehensive sound architecture that is aiming to reshape the paying experience. To introduce their new MOGO – musical logo to the public, the brand chose Electric Castle, Romania’s most famous music festival. But Mastercard’s DNA is priceless for everybody, and not everybody is at a music festival. We’re talking about the deaf community. In Romania, they are usually overlooked and have a hard time finding public events they can attend.

This is how Mastercard decided to turn Electric Castle in the first music festival in Romania to be fully deaf accessible: with a special section at the main stage, sign language interpreters at all the festival hotspots, we built a special area where people could experience the music using all their senses and as a truly priceless experience, got world famous musical interpreter Amber Galloway Gallego to sign the music for the main stage artists.

Mastercard chose Electric Castle to be the first festival to provide this type of accessibility for the deaf community and together they challenged others to join the cause.

Mastercard wanted this to be much more than just a one-time activation, it wanted to help create the infrastructure for inclusion and acceptance, so months before the festival, the brand invited Amber to come and teach local sign language interpreters how to sign music, thus ensuring that for all the following events accessibility will be provided using local workforce.

After Electric Castle, Mastercard launched an open letter to all musical event organizers in Romania to join the initiative. Summer Well and Afterhills quickly responded to it, and thus they contributed to the democratization of music.

Mastercard Vibes continues in 2020, with the next step, creating the infrastructure for inclusion and, together with ANSR (The National Association for the Deaf) announced Unheard, a school where sign language and musical interpretation though sign language will be taught to anybody.