MERCURY
The Context
A founder’s ambition may start a business, but with growth comes complexity. More people. More spending. More approvals. Before long, the flow of money can become the thing slowing a business down, making the founder the very bottleneck scaling is supposed to solve.
Mercury approached MATTE to turn this challenge into a new way of thinking: what if money were treated like any other essential material for building a business? Like clay. Like fabric. Like data. Together, we shaped a 360 campaign around the idea that when money is given shape, context and intelligence, it can flow where it’s needed, when it’s needed, so the work never has to wait.
The Approach
Guided by the central thesis, “Money is your material,” we built a 360 campaign that makes the idea tangible for founders navigating growth. The anthemic film, Give It Shape, uses water as a metaphor for money, moving from a flow that spills, stalls and loses direction to a current that moves fluidly with the business.
Concurrently, a series of Mercury Spend films turns the brand thesis into product proof, introducing Mercury’s new AI-powered spend management system and showing “money shaped to move” in practice.
Beyond film, the idea extends across OOH, stills and a flexible design toolkit, with a verbal language designed to make the messaging human, immediate and intuitive to adopt.
The Outcome
The campaign gives Mercury a distinctive way to express what intelligent banking makes possible, from anthemic brand storytelling to tangible product proof. Across live sports, streaming, cinema, in-flight entertainment and OOH, “Money is your material” carries that point of view to a wider business audience.
BUILT THROUGH CRAFT
Working with director Rune Milton and the production team at SMUGGLER, with post and VFX by Chemistry Film and music and sound design by Citizen Music, the films paired a deeply human, cinematic approach with moments of surrealism that amplified the very real pressures of building a business.
The characters and worlds were carefully researched and built around distinct companies and the people behind them, turning mounting approvals, bottlenecks and operational complexity into something founders could see, feel and recognize as their own.
From the texture of 35mm and the scale of real landscapes to the rhythm of the edit, voiceover, sound and score, we ensure every element of the films is treated as material to be shaped.
