Thinking
Red Bull: everyone's case study, everyone's excuse
Marketers hold Red Bull up as the gold standard, then use it as the reason they can't follow.
For four years I ran the London office of Trailer Park, the Los Angeles entertainment marketing agency, where my team led Red Bull's global content marketing. Since then, I've noticed something odd. Ask a room of marketers for the best example of a brand that entertains, and someone will say Red Bull. Ask why they're not doing the same, and someone will say, "We're not Red Bull."
What everyone says is true
Let's start with what everyone gets right. Red Bull has an instinctive understanding of its audience: what they love, what they watch, where they spend their time. Its content isn't about the drink. It's about energy, and about the people and passions its audience already cares about. That's real, and it's the foundation of everything else.
But it isn't the whole story. There are three things underneath it that rarely get recognised.
The iceberg
What people see of Red Bull are the hits: Felix Baumgartner stepping off the edge of space, Flugtag, the films. What they don't see is everything below the waterline. As far as I'm concerned, for every space jump there are a hundred events, shows or activations that have disappeared into the ether. Does anyone remember The Road Trick, a ten-part magic and travel series? My team marketed it, and even I'd half forgotten.
That comes down to attitude to risk. Teams are given the freedom to try things, and there's a far greater acceptance when things fade, or even fail. Most brands judge every piece of work on its own. Red Bull judges the portfolio.
Where the emphasis sits
Everyone talks about Red Bull's entertainment and overlooks the cartoons. But Red Bull still invests heavily in traditional product advertising, and it does a fundamental job in the marketing mix.
What's different is how the two work together. For most brands, the ad is the centre of everything. A 30-second spot's crafted to within an inch of its life to contain everything a marketer wants to say, in exactly the way they want to say it. So when those brands try entertainment, they expect it to do the same job, and the content suffers.
Red Bull places the emphasis elsewhere. The entertainment properties sit at the centre, and a lot of the paid media, particularly on social, is there to bring people to them rather than push a hard product message. The cartoons keep selling the can alongside. It's not either/or, and it's not a neat division of labour. It's a question of what leads and what supports. That's what I call the Entertainment Flip: putting an idea people would choose to spend time with at the centre, and making the advertising work in support of it.
Talent and infrastructure
Red Bull Media House and Red Bull Studios are their own entities, built around specialist talent who own their areas. The marketing team in Fuschl works hand in hand with them, but they aren't the same thing.
Just as important, Red Bull's marketers are a different breed. As well as marketing a product, they've had to learn how to market content. Most marketing teams can brief an ad. Very few know how to launch a film or build an audience for a series. That's why Red Bull brought Trailer Park in: we were entertainment people first, but we spoke the language of brand marketing.
Not a media company that sells drinks
Which is why I disagree with the line people love to repeat: that Red Bull's "a media company that happens to sell energy drinks." It's the other way round. The entertainment leads, the advertising supports, and the talent and infrastructure make both possible. All of it exists to sell cans. That's the Flip in practice.
Start where Mateschitz started
The question I find most useful is the one Mateschitz faced nearly 40 years ago: forget the product, and decide what space you want to own in your audience's life. When I put it to brands, most answer with a product benefit or a campaign line. That's the habit to break. Red Bull's answer was energy, and it's been serving the cultures that live in that space ever since. The iceberg, the emphasis and the talent all follow from that one decision.
Arguably, it's easier now than it's ever been. To reach his audience, Mateschitz had to build his own channels: a print magazine in The Red Bulletin, a TV channel in Red Bull TV. Today, YouTube has moved from short clips on a phone to long-form viewing on the living-room TV, and publishing costs next to nothing. The blockers that made Red Bull's approach look out of reach aren't there in the same way.
"We're not Red Bull" is true. But you can make the same decision.