Raymond Vermeulen, manager of Max Verstappen, has informed the Red Bull team that the four-time world champion will not readily participate in all of the team’s marketing videos this season. Vermeulen has long been irritated by the quality of the TikTok videos, which he believes detract from the Max Verstappen brand and do not align with the image of other major partners of both Verstappen and Red Bull Racing.
“Major brands like Oracle, Tag Heuer, and Heineken invest a lot of money in global campaigns around Max. Buses are driving around the center of Melbourne with Max’s image, it all looks slick. It doesn’t fit when I then see a TikTok video where Max has to pop balloons. You don’t make those kinds of videos with a four-time world champion,” Vermeulen explains in Melbourne, in the run-up to the first race of the season.
This season, the ideas for Red Bull’s marketing videos will first be presented to Verstappen’s management, and based on that, it will be decided whether or not to cooperate.
Max Verstappen: ‘Nonsense’
On Thursday, Max Verstappen (27) himself indicated that he is glad to have to do fewer ‘nonsense’ things for Red Bull. “I prefer serious activities, I prefer them to bring out things that are constructive and that people might learn something from. I don’t like those ‘nonsense’ things for TikTok,” Verstappen said in Melbourne in a chat with the Dutch media. “I’ve done a lot of that kind of stuff. Writing off caravans with Daniel Ricciardo on a film day in Spielberg, for example, that was a lot of fun. But the world was a bit different then than it is now. And you do something like that once. Then it’s unique. Is there not much unique for me after ten years of Formula 1? Less so. At some point, you also have to be more selective.”
