In the 35-second teaser, Gabriel relaxed in Monaco alongside Chiel Van Koldenhoven. In one of the scenes, the Brazilian pilot drives towards the gym listening to electronic music and practicing a dance with his arms.
In another, he talks about his routine, appearing in the simulator he calls a “happy place”, his passion for cooking for his girlfriend and his friendship with Max Verstappen. The admiration relationship includes nicknames that he promises not to reveal.
Koldenhoven is a Formula 1 reporter and presenter at Viaplay, a streaming service of Swedish origin that arrived in the United States via Prime Video with more than 150 original productions.
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The 22-minute mini documentary with Bortoleto is the most recent among the more than 40 sports productions on the platform. Motorsport dominates the library. Verstappen alone has 13 dedicated titles. Then comes the football content, including one about Ronaldo Fenômeno.
When promoting the film on Instagram, Koldenhoven describes Bortoleto as an “ontzettend leuke gast”. Dutch expression equivalent to “a very nice guy”. The perception is not just that of the journalist.
Two days before the start of the São Paulo GP weekend, Kantar IBOPE Media revealed that Bortoleto needed just one season in F1 to enter among the six celebrities with the greatest affinity with the automotive sector in the country.
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the company’s study arm that measures attributes and perception of personalities, analyzed 22 names. Those who know the 21-year-old pilot describe him as “young/experimenter”, as well as “adventurous/multicultural”
Danilo Amâncio, marketing coordinator at Ibope Repucom, says that Bortoleto “is experiencing a moment of consistent growth and image strengthening in a very high-performance sport”. According to him, this “opens a relevant window for brands that seek association with youth, innovation and excellence, in a sporting context that generates emotional connection and high engagement”.
The mini-film produced by Viaplay illustrates this well. Without the apparatus of overproduction or the weight of a large global platform, it managed to translate in a simple and authentic way what multimillion-dollar brands have not yet understood: athletes like Bortoleto have the ability to mobilize hyperloyal communities and redefine the way the public connects with sport.
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The question is: have brands learned to mobilize fans or do they continue talking only to consumers?
Marketing forgot the story
On the 30th, KitKat and Motorola announced a partnership to celebrate the São Paulo GP and the sponsorship of Gabriel Bortoleto.
The message sent to journalists and influencers promised “a break from the routine” and included headphones, a personalized smartwatch and a chocolate-scented bag created especially for the campaign, with the aim of “enhancing sensory connection”.
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Recently, Nathaly Glashan, executive marketing manager at KitKat, commented on the challenge of creating campaigns with Bortoleto within the restrictions imposed by Formula 1.
This year, I wrote about the chocolate brand’s first campaigns with the pilot. In an attempt to connect the slogan “Have a Break”the content forgot to tell a good story, and reveals how much marketing still thinks like someone who is just filling in a grid, and not building narratives.
The case illustrates what Joseph Akel described in an article published almost a year ago: many brands have outsourced their creativity so much that today they seem incapable of acting as their own storytellers.
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The logic of volume and speed transformed content into constant and empty production. In a landscape shaped by generative AI and new cultural expectations, content needs to rely on perspective, context and connection, not quantity.
That’s what the Dutch journalist and creator understood when producing the mini documentary about Bortoleto. A simple film, recorded at the pilot’s home in Monaco, which showed the Brazilian talking about family, childhood and idols, with more authenticity than any recent corporate campaign.
This is the new pattern that I have been pointing out: moving away from the logic of viralization and thinking about stories as intellectual property. Brands that behave like studios, creating, distributing and nurturing their own universes, build value, not just visibility.
As this year, Formula 1 is already beginning to understand this. The F1–Mercedes–WhatsApp project exemplifies how content goes from being a support piece to the brand to becoming a main cultural building asset.
It’s essential for brands to adopt a content editor mindset, not just a marketing one, taking ownership of their own narratives rather than outsourcing their creativity. Otherwise, they will remain unable to act as the tellers of their stories.
Brands are losing the conversation game
Bortoleto had an intense week in São Paulo. He received the Golden Helmet, the main award in Brazilian motorsport. During a media day, he reacted to a headline that said “Bortoleto is Brazil in Interlagos”. The spontaneity recorded by the video resonated with fans.
The Brazilian also won a brain rot (AI-generated meme) as a gift from a member of the Sauber team. The video was released by the team.
And the culmination was his participation alongside Max Verstappen. Teasers dominated social conversations. On Thursday, the episode aired and, 13 hours later, it had already accumulated more than 270 thousand views.
Each of these moments was recorded and amplified by Brazilian creators and fan accounts.
Outside of these conversations, KitKat’s Brazilian Instagram profile increased the volume of posts with Bortoleto. Most of them predictable, centered on repeating the brand’s catchphrase.
The most original initiative was the invitation to the DJ duo Dubdogz to , which was attended by the pilot.
On Wednesday, the brand published , a program in partnership with Gerson Campos. Bortoleto was the interviewee, but the conversation took place virtually: the pilot only appeared on a monitor inside the studio covered by the brand. The format suggested that the content had been recorded in advance. The 12-minute video had accumulated just 778 views as of Friday afternoon.
At the end of February, The Verge and Vox Media did an in-depth study of the current fragmentation of the internet. The conclusion points out that the future will be made up of smaller communities, focusing on selected experiences.
One of the provocations left was: how should this evolution shape the way creators and media companies build products and brands engage with their audiences?
Joe Weston, in an article for The Drum last year that sports content needs to be memorable to truly amplify the fan experience. According to him, of the more than 10 thousand monthly sports posts on the networks, 70% of the engagement comes from just 10% of the audience.
In the journalist’s view, the lust for reach and volume is resulting in a zero-sum game. Organic growth has plummeted while production scale to feed the media machine ruins the much-vaunted memorable experience for sports fandom.
The tired marketing machine
A few weeks ago, the The Social Juice launched a provocation: Social media is dying. The internet is dying. Where do we go from here? The debate brought recent data and a precise diagnosis: corporate culture has contaminated marketing.
Shutterstock’s shows that a campaign’s credibility drops after just three exposures. Campaigns built from a single idea and distributed in different formats have a 40% higher ROI than those that try to communicate several messages at the same time.
This is data repeated by Kantar, Ipsos and other surveys, but which the market insists on ignoring. The quarterly logic of new campaigns remains untouchable.
“They do not exist to generate connection, but to justify positions and internal reports”, he criticized.
Brands now pay creators, sponsor Instagram accounts, republish employee content, and produce PR articles disguised as independent opinion. They transform first-person marketing efforts into second- and third-person narratives.
“Sound familiar? The problem is that everyone is acting as a third party to simulate authenticity.”
The message left by The Social Juice is intriguing: traditional manuals have become obsolete. Marketing is in crisis. And the main obstacle is the sector itself, trapped in a model that produces volume and boredom at scale.
The reach myth and the effectiveness crisis
James Swift, editor of MediaCat UKrecently highlighted data that helps to understand the erosion of advertising effectiveness. Marketers’ obsession with maximizing reach efficiently is making communication predictable, and therefore irrelevant.
Stuart Bowden, president of global strategy at WPP Media, summed up the problem: by pursuing the same reach goals, “everyone is buying the same formats, on the same platforms, at the same prices.” The result is homogeneous advertising, incapable of creating any kind of real distinction.
One from WPP Media in partnership with Saïd Business School, at the University of Oxford, challenges this vicious cycle. Based on 1.2 million interviews, the study proposes a division of the purchasing journey into two stages: preparation (priming), when the consumer is not yet in the market, but is exposed to messages that shape their attitudes; and the active stage, when he decides to buy.
The data indicates that 84% of purchases are from brands for which the consumer already had some predisposition before even thinking about buying. In no category does the number fall below 70%. In other words, when a brand tries to persuade only those who are ready to buy, it competes for a maximum of 16% of the market.
Felipe Thomaz, marketing professor at Saïd Business School and author of the research, says that paid advertising has a very limited impact at this stage. According to him, “paid media doesn’t really change many people’s opinions.” It is possible to influence, but the chances are three times greater when the brand operates through its own channels, shared or earned, and not paid.
Selecting four media spaces based on receptivity data increases the probability of influence from 20% to 47%. The study recognizes the importance of reach and scale, but shows that building priming (the favorable predisposition to the brand) is what really defines conversion.
The more marketing relies on media efficiency, the further it moves away from real effectiveness.
The excess that empties culture
The data reinforces a point that I have been analyzing throughout the year: the new cycle of excess production is flattening the culture. As Colin McRae warns, when taken to the limit, branding loses meaning and becomes just exposure.
The same goes for stories and characters. Transforming campaigns with a promising pilot into generic content is wasting the emotional assets of the brand and talent.
It’s frustrating to see Bortoleto’s potential reduced to a narrative without depth as I showed here. When campaigns are born from ready-made formulas or are treated as isolated pieces, the result does not inform, does not excite and does not create a bond.
The content of the future depends on three fundamental principles:
• Appear culture, not advertising
• Unfold stories as intellectual properties, with continuity and purpose
• Build connection, not just conversion
The brands that understand this, and move towards full-scale human interactions, will be the ones that remain relevant in a digital environment that is saturated and increasingly less patient with boredom.
