Dear Auckland Transport,

I have a handful of questions about Auckland Transport's Ways to Pay program that I would like to ask using the Official Information Act.

In no particular order:

1. When it comes to using the brand marks of payment card service providers (Visa/Mastercard/American Express) who appear in the Ways to Pay campaign, were any of the payment providers directly involved in the campaign in any capacity, as opposed to say; just being able to use their brand marks as part of a standard payment provider relationship?

1b. If so, which payment providers were involved and could you share a bit about their input?

1c. Was any sign off or authorisation required by brand mark holders to launch the campaign featuring their logos or is it just a hand off, "follow these brand guidelines" type of process?

2. How were the brand mark placements in the campaign designs decided on? For example; in one variation, Visa appears as a hand holding a physical card, Mastercard appears on an Apple Watch and AmEx appears on a phone. I assume these variations were up to the designers discretion and are somewhat random but could you confirm that this is an accurate assumption?

3. How many variations of the Ways to Pay designs are there, across the various print layouts?

4. Were there any payment providers that were considered for inclusion that didn't make it into the final campaign?

5. Does the Ways to Pay campaign have a set end date or will it run more or less indefinitely, at least until the existing AT HOP system is eventually replaced by Motu Move?

Your time and effort is highly appreciated!

Kind Regards,

Marcus

Dear AT Official Information (AT),

Thank you for that information, it's greatly appreciated!

I'd like to get a bit more clarity around Questions 1 and 3 for my own curiosity.

To clear out my assumptions first, I take it that AT has a contractual relationship with each payment provider, either directly or indirectly through a third-party payment processor. As part of that arrangement, I take it that providers offer branded elements to their customers for use in posters, signs and so on, along with some sort of general guidelines of how not to use those elements (ie; proper contrast, don't use non-brand colours etc etc)

Given that, it was mentioned that

> The payment providers were not involved in the creative development of the campaign

and

> We then presented the concepts to the payment card service providers and invited them to be included in the campaign.

but that

> Each payment provider approved the key creatives featuring their card or logo

What I'd like to clarify is whether the payment provider's involvement was ad-hoc, whether it be essentially out of goodwill for the launch of the new payment program or perhaps considered a reasonable service to provide under the umbrella of any existing financial processing arrangement, or if there was any sort of new/additional contractual agreement that was signed for the providers to engage in providing feedback and signing off on the various creative elements?

I'm assuming here that it's the former and that "Each payment provider approved the key creatives" should be interpreted as "Auckland Transport endeavored to use provider brand assets in the recommended way, both out of goodwill and general design taste" and not "AT were obligated to satisfy any feedback items or else risk breaching some clause, either in any new contract on the design side and/or in any existing contract on the financial processing side".

Yours sincerely,

Marcus