Mercury turns every touchpoint into brand magic

When Mercury began planning its Series C announcement, the team didn’t lead with a tired press release—they started with a story.

Striking a balance: “We were finalizing the creative for our latest brand campaign right as we were planning the announcement,” says Heather MacKinnon, Director of Brand at Mercury. “We’ve been doing brand campaigns since 2022, but this latest work is some of our favorite.” With Mercury profitable for 11 consecutive quarters, the Series C raise was less about runway and more about momentum. “This investment is about seizing opportunities for the next phase of growth,” she says.

For MacKinnon and her team, the campaign marks a rare harmony between emotion and clarity. “We believe this time we’ve really captured that balance—evoking emotion through brand storytelling while still communicating what our product does,” she explains. “That’s one of the hardest things in brand marketing. It can either lean too emotional and leave people wondering what the product actually is, or go too functional and lose that feeling you want to convey.”

Creative strength: The video itself is a testament to Mercury’s internal creative strength. While animation was handled by the team at Scholar, much of the work—script, music, sound design, and illustration—was done in-house. “What’s really special is that the painterly brushstrokes you see in the film were hand-painted by one of our designers,” MacKinnon shares. “She painted them, we scanned them, and then our motion designer used 3D software to animate and project them onto forms like parachutes and cliffs. It created this signature feeling of moving paint.”

As a brand, Mercury has always had a voice rooted in authenticity—one that feels ‘real’ to customers. To narrate the video and to stay true to their own voice, Mercury didn’t hire a voice actor—they turned to their founder, Immad Akhund.

“One of the characteristics of the Mercury voice is to be real,” MacKinnon explains. “We’ve always struggled to find voice talent that hits that tone. So what’s more real than having our founder, Immad, speak directly to other founders?”

Nothing short of extraordinary: Each visual in the campaign is a vignette—short, cinematic moments designed to show founders and business owners that Mercury understands what their money moves mean. “It’s all built to reflect Mercury as a single, powerful product that helps them operate at their best,” MacKinnon notes. “And the user experience really does feel nothing short of extraordinary.”

But every great marketer knows that brand is not just about marketing. True brand carries over into every single touch point a customer has with a product. Modern customers can afford to be picky, and they expect perfection in every interaction they have from time of purchase to when they need support.

“Customer support can reset how people think about brand. They’re interacting with our customers one-to-one, and that’s a direct extension of the brand—a really important one,” MacKinnon explains. “Because if you have one poor experience with customer support, that can potentially ruin all the goodness that the product or marketing has done to make you feel great about that brand.”

AI as leverage: The challenge, of course, is keeping that voice present, consistent, and believable. Mercury is beginning to explore how AI can be creatively leveraged to help support the brand, and as a behind-the-scenes support system for agents representing Mercury’s voice on the front lines. While AI is often seen as a threat to human-powered customer support, Mercury is exploring ways to make the two work symbiotically. AI isn’t replacing human interaction—it’s enhancing it, helping support agents communicate in a way that captures the fintech leader’s characteristic realness.