This week Chase shook up the world of premium credit cards with a major revamp of its Sapphire Reserve card.
The premium credit card is turning to heavy hitters from the worlds of pop culture and food to help reintroduce the product to the market. Actor-director Ben Stiller, Nobody Wants This producers Erin and Sara Foster, singer-songrwriter Ella Langley, and chef and Netflix host David Chang are among those featured in the campaign, which will combine personal narratives, humor and some perks from the new card in its spots.
“I liked the tone that they wanted to do with this campaign, in terms of just talking and telling stories and having it being personal, but also having it have a little bit of a humorous, self-deprecating edge to it,” Stiller tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.
It helps, of course, to have a personal connection. And both Stiller and Chang fit that bill.
“If I want to partner with somebody, it’s got to be stuff that I use on a day to day basis,” Chang says. “That’s just who I am and it makes it easy to talk about, because I’ve been a long time Chase Sapphire Reserve card member. I think inherent in that Sapphire program is that it’s probably the single best card that links diners together with eating in restaurants.”
Stiller, meanwhile, notes that the refreshed card will offer perks that personal to a few things close to him, namely The New York Knicks, and his Apple TV+ series Severance. Among the perks offered via the Sapphire Reserve will be a special dinner event in New York, where cardmembers can dine on the court at Madison Square Garden, joined by Knicks legends. Stiller, who is frequently seen courtside at MSG, knows what it’s like (in fact he jokes about it in one the campaign spots).
“For me, that’s a great thing to be able to offer people that’s unique, and having experienced it myself, knowing how much I love that and I appreciate it, I thought, ‘oh, that’s a cool thing to be able to offer people that is not necessarily something you’d be able to get to do elsewhere,” he says of the perk.
And the refreshed card will also offer members credits for Apple TV+ and Apple Music, effectively including them as a benefit of the card. That means that Severance could be seen by an audience that hasn’t already been exposed.
“Selfishly, I think it’s great because more people get to see our show. I think with these streamers, it’s an interesting time, because the way people watch things has changed completely,” Stiller says, noting that the complicated and crowded streaming landscape means that standout out asa creative can be challenging. “To be able to broaden the audience for certain shows that sometimes people might not just be able to watch because they’re having to make choices on streamers — which I understand, too, it’s just a strange new time in terms of how you make these choices to watch things.
“We’ve had a long partnership [with Apple] since they started, and working on the show has been kind of my main job for the last five years,” Stiller added. “So to be able to tie that in and to feel like it just makes sense in terms of what I’m doing creatively, to be able to expand that audience, for people to be able to sample it is really cool, and it felt like a natural fit.
Chang, too, sees things through the creative lens. While the Momofuku mogul gained national attention for his restaurants, he has since become a bona fide media personality via his Majordomo studio.
“I don’t think of it as any different between the media and the restaurants. And what I mean by that is content is what we create– I spend more time doing that these days — but you just consume that in a different way,” Chang says. “And I think our values in what we do in the restaurants is no different than the values that we try to do in media, which is education, giving value. And I think it’s one of the reasons why our partnership with Chase makes sense as well. I think these are all the same things to sort of make make you think about things in a different way, and to widen your scope of what you thought was possible.”
And both say that the perks of the card connect to things that are meaningful to them: Travel, food, discovery. For Stiller,
As a filmmaker, as a kid, I wanted to be making these kind of big, epic movies that I grew up watching,” Stiller says, recalling that people still come up to him say that his 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty inspired them to travel and explore. “That’s an amazing connection that you can have with people through movies too. I feel like it’s very personal, you make something as a filmmaker that you want to see, and then people can connect with that. Because for me, it’s always going into nature, and that aspect of movies has always been something that I’ve loved.”
Chang, meanwhile, says that the nature of where we can find good food is changing, citing Japan as an example, where some of the best restaurants are found in subway stations, or atop office buildings.
“I’ve long said that the future of food is going to be in places that you at least expect it,” he said, adding that Chase has helped shore up food in one of those places: The airport lounge. The bank is opening Sapphire Lounges in airports across the country, and partnering with chefs to help curate their menus.
“It is an oasis when you’re in an airport for a lot of reasons, whether you’re headed to a business meeting or now I have a family, two kids, you need place that you can sort of regroup,” Chang says, expressing frustration at the status quo outside the lounges. “With Chase, the lounges that are in growing numbers in airports around the country, are going to be delicious. And I can say that without any BS, because it’s true.”
