Most performers take an existing routine and change the words. This is the other thing — designing the performance backwards from a brand’s message, and building whatever props have to exist for it to work.
Mastercard approached me through their marketing agency for a series of events. What follows is the work I built in response to their brief. It was selected ahead of the other performers considered.
The brief: a campaign theme of Powering Commerce, a room of guests, a bar, and a requirement that the entertainment carry the message rather than interrupt it.
Every business Mastercard is in comes down to the same idea: invisible systems producing reliable outcomes. Nobody sees the infrastructure; they feel the result. That is also a precise description of mentalism — which meant the theme did not need translating into a show. It was the show.
So each routine was engineered to demonstrate one function of their actual business.
Five premium cocktails, five identical cups, no markings. A volunteer chooses freely. Blindfolded and facing away, I identify not just the category but the exact cocktail by name.
Maps to: fraud detection — hidden variables still yielding predictable outcomes.
Five participants answer the same questions. One tells the truth, four lie. Micro-expression, language pattern and behavioural leakage are read live, in front of the room.
Maps to: risk identification and verifying intent in real time.
Every guest enters a number personally tied to their own working life in commerce. The room’s numbers combine into a single figure nobody chose alone.
Maps to: billions of independent transactions resolving through one system into one result.
The keepsake was not merchandise. It was the mechanism.
Guests took home a power bank designed to the size, scale and branding of a black Mastercard — sourced from a supplier, with printed samples commissioned to prove it. The reveal board carried a slot at the top shaped for it.
A guest’s Mastercard, powering commerce. Not as a metaphor for the campaign line — as the physical mechanism of the reveal, in front of the room, using an object they keep.
The cocktails were renamed as outcomes rather than risks — Trust, Flow, Connection, Security, Growth, Priceless — so the bar became part of the narrative instead of sitting next to it. Every drink ordered restated the campaign, in plain sight, all night.
Designed for Mastercard. Delivered by Phoenix.
All concepts, designs and methodology remain the copyright of Mentalist Phoenix.
Tell me what it has to say and what the room is. If a bespoke build is the right answer, you will get one. If a standard show would serve you better and cost you less, you will be told that instead.
