The hook. In January 2022, days after the original Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, Mint Mobile published a storybook. Ryan Reynolds reads you the gentle tale of Winnie-the-Screwed, a bear of very little money, because he pays far too much for his phone bill. It was the first major brand parody of Pooh after the copyright lapsed.
Why it works. The creative is fine. The timing is the ad. Public domain day is a scheduled cultural event that every brand could see coming, and only Mint shipped against it within days. Speed turned a cheap storybook read-aloud into a news story, which is the whole Maximum Effort model: let the news cycle be the media budget. The scrappy production is not a compromise, it is the joke. A bedtime story about bill shock costs almost nothing, signals that Mint does not waste money, and quietly restates the entire brand promise: the big carriers are a fairy tale you have been told too many times.
Steal this. Keep a calendar of dates when culture unlocks: public domain days, anniversaries, expiring trademarks, rule changes. Pre-write the idea, then ship within the week while the window is open. Scrappy and first beats polished and third, every time.
Ad by Mint Mobile and Maximum Effort. Campaign documented on Wikipedia's Mint Mobile page.