Look! Up In The Sky! It’s Super Brand!

Michael Hedges October 31, 2011 Follow on Twitter

These are tough times for brand marketing companies. The plethora of media channels and their fragmented audiences make delivering the message difficult and expensive. One solution, of course, is to spend lots of money and keep absolute control.

It was a mighty leap, last Sunday, as a lone man drifted skyward to the edge then traversed that space as no person has done. After a ten-minute descent, more than four in spinning free-fall, Felix Baumgartner had set several records before standing again on terra firma. One of the more significant, the technical feat notwithstanding, was “most concurrent views ever on YouTube,” reported Google. More than eight million were glued to YouTube.

That leap from the edge gave energy drink maker Red Bull, known as‘bankers lunch’ in Geneva, yet another marketing triumph. The company has attached itself to extreme sports – cliff diving to snowboarding and wakeboarding to motocross - as well as Formula One racing, no longer considered death-defying, and football, owning clubs in Leipzig, Germany, Salzburg, Germany, Campinas, Brazil and the New York Red Bulls. On the same Sunday Red Bull F1 drivers Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber placed one and two in the Korean GP.

Red Bull also owns Austrian cable TV channel Servus TV, which carried live nearly ten hours of the Red Bull Stratos jump. In Germany, news channel n-tv carried the entire broadcast, produced by Servus TV, and reached 2.24 million viewers for 8.8% market share.

The publicity stunt has revered status in the marketing world. People have been shot from cannons, perched on polls and dangled above crocodile-infested waters all in the hope of gaining attention. Then there was the late Evel Knievel, who turned death-defying motorcycle jumping into entertainment events, many ending in spectacular crashes. After Sunday’s leap Mr. Baumgartner said his skydiving days are finished.

And space has been a popular venue for marketers. Fruit drink mix Tang was, at first, unofficially but successfully – for General Foods – associated with the early US space program when it was added to astronauts menu. Current Tang producer Kraft Foods dropped the space program marketing after the Apollo missions were cancelled. Israeli dairy producer Knuva spent US$50 million to film the first space-based TV commercial aboard the Mir spacecraft in 1997.

“The Red Bull Stratos mission is a professional flight test program,” exclaimed spokesperson Maddy Zeringue, quoted by Forbes (October 15). “With the leadership of Red Bull Stratos technical project director, Art Thompson, a world-leading team of scientists, engineers and experts in aerospace medicine have been assembled to not only create the equipment necessary to help Felix reach his personal goal of freefall from 120,000 feet, but also to have the ability to deliver valuable physiological data to the scientific community.”

To be sure, science figured significantly into Mr. Baumgartner’s leap from 39 kilometers. The balloon, capsule and space suit were top-flight technology. Red Bull paid for it all, and the years developing and testing it. There were 35 video cameras fitted nicely to broadcast the event, required for maximum benefit. “Tell them what you’re going to do, do it then tell them what you did,” say the marketing sages.

Marketing people shy away from staging breath-holding events, preferring the Disney tradition of finding a parade and claiming it. Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz, first and foremost a marketing guy, isn’t encumbered with tradition. The company owns Red Bull Stratos, the F1 team, the football teams, even the football stadium in Austria. This keeps decisions – and impact - clear.

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