In 2024, DBS announced a partnership with national kitefoiler Maximilian Maeder ahead of his debut in the Paris Olympic Games. As DBS’ brand ambassador, Max had a natural alignment with DBS. His resilience, ambition, pursuit of excellence and desire to give back to community mirror DBS’ commitment to empowering individuals to push their boundaries and trust in their own potential.
At the same time, DBS was launching our "Trust Your Spark" (TYS) campaign, a regional initiative aimed at inspiring individuals to believe in themselves and pursue their ambitions. Max was a natural fit for this campaign – not just as an athlete, but as someone whose journey embodies the TYS ethos of perseverance, passion, and purpose.
To showcase this partnership that’s anchored in shared values, YouTube was identified as a key platform, leveraging the strength of long-form storytelling and short-form discoverability to engage audiences effectively. DBS developed exclusive content IPs with Max to create unique, compelling content that seamlessly integrated brand messaging into narratives that were authentic, organic, and highly engaging.
The key objectives of this YouTube partnership were:
To drive meaningful engagement on YouTube, DBS developed these key content streams (among others):
These series were not traditional endorsements – they positioned Max as a storyteller, seamlessly integrating DBS’ values of perseverance, trust, and ambition into engaging, shareable content.
At the time of DBS’ partnership with Max Maeder, the young kitefoiling world champion was a rising star. His journey to the Paris 2024 Olympics had captured national and international media attention, making him a sought-after figure across multiple platforms. With widespread coverage surrounding Max, DBS needed to take a different approach—one that would cut above the clutter, go beyond standard sponsorship and forge a deeper meaningful brand association.
Empowering Max to be his authentic self
As our brand ambassador, we wanted Max’s authenticity to come through in his associations with the bank. We wanted to showcase the spark that drives him to excel and the importance of his supportive ecosystem.
The challenge: There was alot of media attention on him post his Olympic medal and people were starting to see the same interview content all over the media. How could we cut through with compelling, engaging content?
At the time of DBS’ partnership with Max Maeder, the young kitefoiling world champion was a rising star. His journey to the Paris 2024 Olympics had captured national and international media attention, making him a sought-after figure across multiple platforms. With widespread coverage surrounding Max, DBS needed to take a different approach—one that would cut above the clutter, go beyond standard sponsorship and forge a deeper meaningful brand association.
Empowering Max to be his authentic self
As our brand ambassador, we wanted Max’s authenticity to come through in his associations with the bank. We wanted to showcase the spark that drives him to excel and the importance of his supportive ecosystem.
The challenge: There was alot of media attention on him post his Olympic medal and people were starting to see the same interview content all over the media. How could we cut through with compelling, engaging content?
So, playing to Max’s strengths, we flipped things around and made Max the storyteller. As host of the Game On! Vodcast, he would engage DBS leaders and other guests in candid, insightful conversations about resilience, ambition, and overcoming challenges—themes that naturally aligned with both his journey and DBS’ values.
In the first two episodes, he interviewed DBS Deputy CEO Tan Su Shan and his mother, Hwee Keng Maeder. The series is ongoing, with more episodes to be rolled out this year.
Given Max’s heavy schedule, and limited time in SIngapore, we organised the production within days of learning of his schedule, with a quick turnaround.
As an athelete who travels the world competing, Max has a unique world view and experiences. We wanted to offer viewers an unfiltered view into an athelete’s life of pursuing excellence – while drawing the association that DBS continues to support Max in his everyday moments.
This led to Max in a Minute, a fast-paced, high-energy series of 60-second clips, showing an intimate, first-person perspective of Max’s life, training, and travel. Instead of a traditional production setup, we worked with Max so he could shoot from a first person point of view – ensure the videos are authentic and native to social media platforms, similar to a personal vlog rather than a brand-led campaign.
Integrating leadership & brand messaging for deeper engagement
A key highlight was the exclusive content featuring a two-part conversation with DBS CEO Piyush Gupta before he went for the Paris Olympics. The interview was featured in our partnership announcement later on, and shared with mainstream media. We later created and amplified more exclusive short-form content when Max was at DBS for a fireside chat with Piyush after his Olympic medal, as the duo chatted about Max’s journey and our shared values of resilience, the pursuit of excellence and more.
Other content pieces include a Trust Your Spark marquee video asset that featured Max’s journey from an ambitious 11-year-old to an Olympic medallist, as well as short-form cutdowns from various offline engagements with DBS where Max answered more questions about himself, or reacted to comments from audiences etc.
This strategic content approach transformed the partnership from a traditional athlete endorsement into a meaningful content-led collaboration that humanised the brand while reinforcing Max’s credibility beyond the sporting arena.
Multi-Format YouTube Strategy: A Balanced Approach
To maximise engagement and reach different audience segments, our content approach combined both long-form (Game On!, CEO conversations etc) and short-form (Max in a Minute, video cutdowns) storytelling.
Optimised for YouTube Shorts, the content captured short attention spans while driving traffic back to long-form episodes that contained more key brand messages.
In total, our videos garnered over 2.6 million views and over 3.3 million minutes watched across YouTube and YouTube shorts.
