Red Bull: Stratos
Red Bull takes a different approach to marketing. To live up to its strapline ‘Red Bull gives you wings’, it creates and supports stunts that go beyond advertising. From soapbox racing to amateur flying machine competitions, to this: a Guinness World Record-breaking jump from the edge of space.
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Red Bull Stratos was already in planning when I joined the project. The key challenge was: ‘how do we make sure people care enough to watch this as a live event?’
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Stratos couldn’t just be a one-off event: we had to build anticipation and ‘buzz’ so that when the jump came, people were emotionally invested in the outcome.
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Create content ‘milestones’ that turned Felix Baumgartner’s jump into an emotional story we could all connect with, rather than a feat of madness.
With planning well underway for Red Bull: Stratos, the company secured TVC, a broadcast PR agency I worked with, to turn the jumo into an Event with a capital ‘E’. With the jump still some two years away, the company was struggling to gain traction for press coverage and they feared turnout would be low.
I developed a content strategy that used ‘milestones’ to build anticipation. Each was an emotionally invested story that either a) created the stunt into a personal odyssey for Felix, b) into a valuable exploration of the science of our stratosphere, or c) highlighted the very real dangers of things going wrong.
This meant stories about the balloon and the suit (science, valuable data), meeting 84-yr-old Joe Kittinger who had held the previous highest freefall record since 1960 (personal odyssey), to coverage of the many failed equipment tests (personal danger). By the time Felix was ready to jump, the campaign had generated thousands of news stories around the world, including 8,000 pieces of global TV coverage just in the week of the jump.
“The success of the Red Bull Stratos project underlines a broad cultural shift in marketing where brands are attempting to improve society, not just their bottom lines.”
– Nicola Kemp, Campaign Magazine
A leap of fame.
By jumping Felix Baumgartner broke 9 world records, including most concurrent views for a live event on YouTube and the largest audience for a livestream ad (getting bigger audiences even than Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony; beat that, Donald).
Felix became the first human to break the sound barrier (768 mph) in freefall and broke the record for the fastest speed in freefall.
By the time Felix landed an estimated global audience of 600 million people had watched the event, which was carried live by over 100 broadcast partners in 60 countries.
In 2013 following the Red Bull Stratos jump there was a 13% increase in global Red Bull sales.
“Stratos shows that Red Bull isn’t solely a provider of content anymore. This is the purest example of the brand as a story; the brand itself has become the content.”
– James Murphy, Editorial Director at the Future Foundation
Red Bull Stratos won pretty much every award in the industry.
But the one I was most proud of was its Emmy Award for the live coverage of the event. My role in the campaign through TVC was just a small part of that achievement.