My Life, My Card
American Express was about to sell something it had never sold before, it's name. For the first time it was going to allow banks to issue American Express cards. This would mean a massive proliferation of cards in the marketplace. For an aspirational brand built on a sense of exclusivity and integrity it was a huge risk. The My Life, My Card campaign was created to show that being a cardholder has never been simply about status, it’s about personal identity.
We interviewed each celebrity about their real lives, and the work came out of that. Annie Leibovitz interrogated them with her lens. And the films were based on real life experiences from our subjects. Ellen DeGeneres’s childhood ambition to work with Animals, Wes Anderson’s day to day on a film set, Kate Winslet’s desire to avoid drama in her real life, and Robert DeNiro’s love letter to the city he lives in. These stories were brought to life by luminary directors like Bryan Buckley, Martin Scorsese, and for the Oscars, Wes himself.
The campaign resulted in the highest awareness the brand had achieved in many years, and won multiple awards, including an Emmy.