For as long as I can remember, credit-card marketing has been stuck an endless cycle of equity advertising. It’s a story we see in categories as diverse as automobiles, beer, and life insurance: When there is little innovation and lack of differentiation among major brands in a category, their advertising agencies are called on to gin up something remarkable.

In credit cards, the pattern has held firm for years, and the result is an endless loop of ads that celebrate how much life can be enjoyed because of the convenience and buying power of credit. Visa recently moved from its “Life Takes Visa” campaign to the current “Go” work, which includes millions of dollars in celebrity endorsements (Michael Phelps), celebrity voice-overs (Morgan Freeman), and licensed music (Moody Blues). American Express has had “My Life, My Card.” And MasterCard has stuck with its own version, “Priceless,” for more than 12 years. But a few weeks ago MasterCard took one small step out of the pack with an iPhone app that finally does something “real” through meaningful marketing to deliver on its promises.

The MasterCard Priceless Picks app, a free download from iTunes, is a clever tool that recognizes your location and presents a 3-D map of various “Priceless Picks” in your area. Its use of the touch screen interface is excellent, and within seconds I was able to explore the city around me. Unknown people or bots have populated the maps with restaurants, bars, museums, and popular items on sale. A little clicking offers more information, and the chance to send to a friend, flag as improper, or get more details. I actually discovered two interesting places across the river from my office, a coffee shop called the Bean Haus (“best place for a snug cup of coffee”) and an ice cream shop called Sweet Tooth, which apparently has great homemade chocolate chip. The video below from MasterCard shows a few user examples:

As a MasterCard customer, I really appreciate that the brand is trying to actually deliver on its “Priceless” brand promise, and the choice of an iPhone app works because it is a tool that is truly integrated with our daily lives. In fact, this is the second iPhone app from MasterCard. A few months ago it launched an ATM Hunter that allows users to find ATMs near their location, and sort by preferences such as drive-thru and no service charge.

As a Meaningful Marketer, I love that MasterCard is carving off at least a small piece of its mammoth budget and adding value to its customers’ lives through marketing itself. While Visa dumps hundreds of millions of dollars into beautiful TV “film” that is aimed at brainwashing viewers into pulling its card out more often, MasterCard has given us something worth talking about and playing with, and it just might help us discover something new and “priceless” in our hometowns or travel destinations. This kind of marketing (rather than a pretty new ad campaign) actually has a chance of helping the brand differentiate in the credit-card category.

I do admit there are some bugs and bumps in this app. I would expect a lot more than a handful of flagged locations in downtown Cincinnati, for example. And some of the picks are pretty lame, such as “$13.99 Huggies or CVS/pharmacy infant formula.” In an Ad Age article about the app, marketing consultant Tom Anderson suggests that, “You only have one chance with an app like this. If users come to it and it smells like an ad, then it is an ad, and with no value added it will die quickly.”

I actually disagree that the MasterCard app has to be perfect out of the gate, as long as the company goes into the app with a plan to continually learn and improve. There is much to be learned from seeing thousands of actual users engaging with it and adding their own picks. Some features such as its partnership with ShopLocal (which likely supplied the questionable Huggies ad above) might just be temporary tools that help get a critical mass of content while people are just discovering the app. At worst, people who have a subpar experience will revisit the app sometime in the future when they are bored and give it another chance.

I’m rooting for MasterCard’s value-added app approach and plan to upload a few of my own Priceless Picks, while pulling out my own MasterCard more often.