February 2nd, 2010
Red Bull Better Give You Wings
It came to me first via @scobleizer.
And then there were some other tweets. Talking of this new site.
Featuring Red Bull.
And Silverlight.
And some crazy mother’ who is going to jump out of a balloon at 120,0000 feet in a spacesuit. Some crazy mother named Felix Baumgartner.
It is called Red Bull Stratos . And it just might be ‘The Bomb’. But not for the reasons you might think. It is astounding, crazy, freaky and powerful that a man is willing to ‘jump’ from such a height. I once jumped from 4,000 or so feet and though it had it’s moments of beauty that was enough for me.
Yes. There is the question of, “How do you brake?” But that hopefully will get solved.
As a media observer what is fascinating about this is the marriage of content, technology and brand, all of which is accomplished with nary a 3rd party distributor like a Yahoo!, MSN, YouTube or Hulu.
Red Bull has been ramping up the role that content plays in their marketing, and as we near the opening of the Winter Olympics this is only escalating with their sponsorship of fan favorites Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White. But with Red Bull Stratos you have something remarkably different, so different that it bears mention.
Here you have a one-of-a-kind activity (space jumping) with an ‘athlete’ in the Red Bull fold (Felix Baumgartner) creating a media event that is being powered by a technology company (Microsoft).
And this is to be the first of many, here’s an excerpt from blogger David William’s site outlining where Microsoft hopes to see this partnership go.
In parallel, Microsoft is in the process of developing a broader media technology and marketing partnership with Red Bull, where they want to bring together Red Bull’s premium content and innovation-in-marketing with our technology platform and worldwide reach with consumers. The goal of this partnership is to develop a cutting edge media distribution and marketing platform on our stack that will allow Red Bull and their +400 athletes and artists to run super targeted media and experiential marketing campaigns within their broad portfolio of events, including Formula One, Red Bull Air Race and Red Bull Music Academy and many others.
So, hat’s off to Red Bull. And all you Media Companies who think you make the content and then marketers have to pay you to be associated with it? Take a look at this slice of the future – the disintermediation of your role hasn’t simply begun, it’s in full swing.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Advertising, Strategy, Video, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
