Mastercard's WhereToStart tells small businesses where to open — Cannes Data Grand Prix

After 1.55M Ukrainian refugees arrived in Poland and began opening businesses — 1 in 10 new firms by 2023 — resentment framed them as competitors. Mastercard wanted to reframe them as growth, following its 2023 'Where to Settle' platform.

Give small entrepreneurs the location intelligence only big chains could afford: a free tool scoring any address's odds of success from anonymized card-spend data.

McCann Poland built WhereToStart: a free, no-registration site scoring locations across Poland's 37 largest cities using anonymized Mastercard spending trends, Orange Polska mobile-traffic data and noise levels. It also flags 'power couple' pairings — complementary businesses like bakery and barber that lift each other — and links to real premises listings via Morizon-Gratka.

The 'Room for Everyone' initiative won the Cannes Lions 2024 Creative Data Grand Prix and the Eurobest 2024 Creative Data Grand Prix; the tool expanded to Czechia and Slovakia in August 2024.

Poland saw over 310,000 new companies open in 2022 — roughly 1,000 a day — and one in ten was Ukrainian-owned, after 1.55M refugees settled there. Public sentiment was turning: refugees who had been welcomed as guests were now eyed as business rivals.

Mastercard's answer was not a message but a tool. WhereToStart, built with McCann Poland, lets any entrepreneur type in a business category and an address, and get a data-backed verdict on that spot's odds of success — built from aggregated, anonymized Mastercard spending trends, Orange Polska foot-traffic statistics and noise levels.

Its cleverest layer is the complementary-business model: the data shows which pairs of shops — a bakery next to a barber, a pet store next to a drugstore — measurably do better side by side, turning competitors into neighbours who lift each other. That finding is the campaign's argument in miniature.

Previously this kind of location intelligence was sold only to large corporations; Mastercard made it free, no sign-up, across Poland's 37 largest cities, with live commercial-property listings attached. The work won back-to-back Creative Data Grand Prix at Cannes 2024 and Eurobest 2024.

It reused the exact data asset behind 2023's 'Where to Settle', extending a proven platform instead of launching a one-off stunt.

The 'power couples' finding gave an integration message empirical backbone — neighbours genuinely earn more together.

Free, no-registration access made the tool genuinely useful, which made the brand claim ('room for everyone') checkable by anyone.

Jury president Rose Herceg cited its social, economic and cultural delivery in one campaign when awarding the Cannes Grand Prix.

Data a company already owns can be its most credible ad: publish it as a free public tool and the brand proof is the product itself.

WhereToStart expanded to Czechia and Slovakia in August 2024. It completed a two-year arc: 'Where to Settle' (2023 Cannes SDG Grand Prix, Titanium Lion) placed refugees in under-populated towns; 'Room for Everyone' then placed their businesses. McCann Poland and Mastercard won Cannes Grand Prix in consecutive years with the same data-for-good model.