Max resigns

F1 is back after summer break. And with it comes news of Max Verstappen’s future: He’s re-signed with Red Bull through 2030. The Red Bull team published a brilliant announcement video on Instagram yesterday. 

Team principal Laurent Mekies is trying to type the subject line for the company-wide email. He types “Max resigns,” and keeps saying, “It can’t be right.” He then asks Max, “Does it look right to you?” The camera flips to Max, and he says, “No, no. There’s meant to be a hyphen in there.” Mekies deletes “resigns” and types “re-signs,” then winks at the camera.

It’s like a thirty-second video. Hilarious, elegant, simple. Sometimes a great ad or campaign just clicks around one simple idea. Yet the work to arrive at that simple headline “Max re-signs” must have taken hours, perhaps days, to think about. I know because I’ve been the one who has written headlines for big campaigns. 

The production aspect—the script, the video, the publishing—probably took no more than a few hours, but the thought that went into that two-word headline was probably most of the budget for that campaign. Alternatively, perhaps the copywriter had the idea in the shower on the first day and boom it was done in a matter of minutes, but that’s less common than you’d think.

It’s like that old proverb that says a wise man spends the bulk of his time sharpening the blade of his ax. Claude can do some efficient production, but it’s not always a great thinker developing elegant, creative stories. That often requires a human being. 

In fact, Claude may be making some marketing more expensive because it may create more assets than you really need. I asked Claude what it would recommend for this campaign idea, and it created a complicated video that would’ve taken weeks or months to produce, and it would probably have been less memorable.

Claude is the guy with the dull ax, where 80% of the marketing time goes into just producing the work. A top marketer is the wise man, spending 80% of the time thinking about a clever, compelling, elegant idea, reducing the overall budget required to make an impact.

Sometimes the simpler marketing is the better—and cheaper—marketing.