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In October 2012, Red Bull launched Stratos, an audacious event where it sent parachutist Felix Baumgartner up 39 kms into the stratosphere in a balloon so he could jump and break the sound barrier while free falling. Baumgartner became the first human to do so.
The stunt, which Red Bull had been planning for seven years, was itself perhaps not so surprising when you consider the company had been sponsoring extreme action sports almost its inception. What was ingenious, however, was what it did with the event.
The energy drink maker assumed sole command of chronicling Stratos on film and, according to reports, funneled it through some 80 television outlets in five countries along with a live stream on Youtube that was 16 times greater than the views for the summer Olympics that took place a few months before Stratos."Red Bull today is an experiential marketer which happens to make beverages, says Anita Karnik, Principal Partner, branded entertainment and activation, Mindshare.
Red Bull today is a full-fledged media production company with thousands of hours of footage of extreme sporting events that it owns the copyright to. It also flogs them in bits and pieces off its internet site while giving some off it away for free. "The whole idea for us is to become a media company," says Rohan Vyavaharkar, national communications manager for Red Bull in India. Industry observers say that the global vision is to ultimately make the company's content sales equal to that of its energy drinks. That vision has come to India and Red Bull is stepping up its mandate here by bringing action sports to the masses as original event programming while trying to make money off it.
Fans of motorsports are probably familiar with their last campaign, associated with Formula One racing. In October 2011, before the championship race at the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida, the company shipped one of its exhibition cars to Leh, Ladakh and had it race around hairpin bends on its way to Khardung La, the second highest motorable road in Ladakh. This spawned a 40-minute documentary on the effort which was produced and sold to Discovery channel.
Capturing India
In September last year, the streets of Bandra in Mumbai were witness to another Red Bull spectacle-the Soapbox race, an event that takes place in 90 other cities across 40 countries. The mandate was to create an engineless build-it-yourself craft that humans would power in a race. 700 entries were received and 50 of them competed on the streets of Mount Mary over five hours in front of a crowd of 12,000 people. The quixotic range of crafts ranged from feni bottles and condoms to toilets and Vada Paus. Red Bull sold two half-hour shows for an undisclosed amount to History TV 18.
An event that attracted mass appeal was the arrival of Chris Pfeiffer, a world champion exponent of free style street motorcycling, who toured five cities with India and was hosted by Rannvijay of Roadies fame. No sporting activity-extreme or otherwise-could possibly complete with cricket in India. And so, Red Bull launched 'Campus Cricket' in 2012, which had eight colleges from eight cities competing in a 20/20 format. A long-term plan has been to establish coaching clinics and overseas placements such as in the English Country season. The format has also been transplanted to 100 campuses across six countries. A few days ago, India beat Pakistan in the 2013 championship game.
Robert Holdheim, head of Public Relations firm Edelman for India, which has Red Bull's account for Events and PR, but not for its digital properties, sums up Red Bull's philosophy. "This is their proposition: 'Give me an idea, I don't care where it comes from. We're channel agnostic.' The approach starts with content, then looks at traditional media, hybrid, social (bloggers), owned (facebook) and experiential marketing."
This leads to why the Stratos project heralds a larger, more disruptive change in our digital era, say experts. Gone are the days of image marketing. Now, consumers-especially youth-are increasingly asking for brands they can relate to without it being shoved down their throats.
Great expectations
What makes the company a potent threat is the way the world is going in content consumption, with a lot it transitioning to digital video format over the internet and across technology platforms. The Red Bull Channel on YouTube has 2,013,616 subscribers versus (in a random sampling of sites) Pepsi's (165, 816), Nike's (71,047) and Procter & Gamble's (9,674). A full-length snowboarding feature film "The Art of Flight," was the No. 1 movie download on iTunes (at $5.99) during its first week of release in September 2011; 'The Red Bulletin,' its monthly magazine, has an international circulation of 2.7 million.
This success doesn't necessarily spell out an easy road in India though. "The trick for them is to make sure they have a 'share of throats,'" says Mindshare's Karnik, adding that for beverages it's still all about sales. Moreover, energy drinks are becoming an attractive space and competition is rising especially with the entrance of low cost indigenous brands like Tzinga. Then, there's covering production costs for content, which can become a nightmare if television can't pay the high tab that goes into generating it. For instance, the cost of Stratos, the 23-mile free-fall jump, was apparently around $20 million.
For now though, Red Bull is a $7 billion beverage company that is already a major force in the content business, and in the economics of monetising a new generation who consume much of it. Industry hands say that it hopes to recover much of its marketing costs (which are 30 to 40 per cent of sales) through selling content, a monumental feat, if it happens.
"Red Bull gives you wings," is the company's motto and the brand has certainly sprouted a few pairs of its own to propel it into becoming a global production force. The question is, can they continue to do so amidst the turbulent currents of a quickly changing digital world and regions of the globe that may have different appetites for its content?
