"I
know the whole world is watching now," said Felix Baumgartner, at the
edge of space. They were--Red Bull Stratos set viewing records and
marked another giant leap for a brand that’s setting the standard for
content marketing.
For most brands, a risky marketing move consists of not
testing the copy on that new ad, or using a new media channel despite
the lack of rock solid metrics.
Red Bull’s idea of risk is that one of its sponsored athlete’s bodily
fluids will turn into gas as he plummets 24 miles from space at 800+
miles per hour while his parents, girlfriend, and the rest of the world
watch, live.
With the Red Bull Stratos Project,
the energy drink brand-turned-media company brought extreme sports
spectacle to new heights and redefined the idea of content marketing, PR
stunt, and brand utility.
Of course, the real risk was taken by Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian
skydiver, BASE jumper, and all-round daredevil who, on Sunday, while
millions watched, stepped from a balloon-borne capsule into a
128,000-foot freefall to earth. Baumgartner started working in 2005 with
Red Bull, which would back the Stratos project as sponsor. The idea was
to send Baumgartner to the edge of space in a stratospheric balloon,
have him execute a free-fall jump, hit supersonic speeds, and then
parachute safely to the ground. The purpose: to break a record set by
former U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger, who made a 19-mile jump in
1960, to record reams of data from the leap that could be used by the
aerospace, commercial flight, and medical industries, and, for Red Bull,
to set a new standard in extreme sports cred.
Live video captured the jump on Sunday October 14, after last week’s
planned launch was cancelled due to high winds. Viewers watching on
YouTube or the Discovery Channel or following along on the many sites
that covered the event saw Baumgartner ascend into the stratosphere,
stand on his capsule’s tiny platform and then, simply, step into the
void. The jump, which, initially, looked perfect, turned at one point
into the kind of out of control flat spin that could have knocked
Baumgartner unconscious. There was also some concern about his space
suit’s visor fogging up, a glitch that could have scuttled the mission.
But Baumgartner managed to correct the spin, deal with the gear issues
and after the fall, parachute lightly onto the earth in the eastern New
Mexico desert.
In a press conference after the event, Baumgartner and his team,
including Kittinger, technical project director Art Thompson, life
support engineer Mike Todd, and medical director Jonathan Clark,
confirmed that the successful jump had broken three records: highest
jump, with an exit altitude of 128,100 feet; longest free fall at 4
minutes and 20 seconds, and maximum highest vertical velocity:
Baumgartner fell 119, 846 feet or 36,529 meters reaching a maximum
velocity of 373 meters per second or 833.9 miles an hour. Put another
way, Mach 1.24--faster than the speed of sound.
The record-breaking jump represented the work of a number of entities
and experts who collaborated on the creation of the pressure suit
(designed by the David Clark Company), capsule, and the 55-story,
3,000-pound balloon that lifted the capsule, parachutes, cameras, and
communications gear, data collection, and other elements.
While Baumgartner and his team celebrated the milestones achieved
through years of technical work on all of those moving parts, Red Bull
could celebrate another record--more than 8 million people watched the YouTube Live stream of the event,
besting President Obama’s inauguration, and any other mainstream
spectacle. Meanwhile, the event drew untold millions in earned media.
According to Red Bull, footage from the event will also be used in a BBC
documentary that will air in November and on National Geographic
Channel in the U.S.
Red Bull has a long history of producing high-end events and content
beloved by exactly the kinds of people that you’d think would love Red
Bull content, and Red Bull itself--snowboarders, skateboarders,
adventure sports types, gamers, and the bros who emulate them. But more
recently, the company has also enjoyed more mainstream success. Its Art Of Flight
feature film, which captured the antics of the world’s top snowboarders
on the world’s least-ridden mountains, was the top-selling movie on
iTunes the week of its release. And while the number of people who might
consider themselves hardcore space jumping fans is probably fairly
small, the sheer scale, audacity and…weirdness of Stratos pulled in
millions of fans of aviation, mainstream sports, science and…weirdness.
During the event, Red Bull Stratos was trending (under a few different headings) on Twitter, as everyone from athletes to magazines like GQ
and social media pundits to the Gates Foundation to hoi polloi tweeted
about the event in admiring tones. When do you ever see that swath of
humanity tweeting in gee whiz admiration about a branded event? Not
often.
There’s a lot that’s astonishing about the project, but one of the
more quietly amazing things is that this is a privately funded
quasi-space mission--NASA (the U.S. government) is going to be reaping
data from a major aerospace project funded and orchestrated by a brand.
(As one wag tweeted after the event: "That awkward moment when you
realize an energy drink has a better space program than your nation").
This is the new world of marketing--where the advertising efforts of
brands become public works--think Nike funding childhood obesity studies
and creating campaigns to get kids moving and American Express creating
an initiative to get the public shopping at small businesses.
And, more simply, it’s an insanely ambitious standard for content marketing. As noted here before,
Red Bull has gone further than almost any other brand in demolishing
the line between the company’s “primary” business--making energy
drinks--and the corollary business of creating content and experiences
for the people that it considers its target audience for those drinks.
To say that Red Bull creates content at this point to sell energy
drinks, while technically true, has become almost misleading as a way to
encapsulate the company’s mission and its marketing philosophy. For Red
Bull, “content” has meant inventing a new snowboarding competition and
related video content, making a feature film, creating a championship
Formula 1 team--and now, putting a man at the edge of space for an
unprecedented leap and an unprecedented PR spectacle--and, more and
more, the content is the business.
Since the company was founded in 1987, it’s built its content
creation discipline just as rigorously as it’s built its beverage
distribution channels, or any product-related mechanism. It’s become a
media company. When Co.Create asked company founder Dietrich Mateschitz
earlier this year whether Red Bull was a drinks-maker or a content
producer, i.e., whether the athletes and sports ventures supported the
selling of beverages or the other way around, the answer was, in
essence. “yes.” “This is not either or,” said Mateschitz. “It is both
ways, the brand is supporting the sports and culture community, as well
as the other way round.” So what’s it like to free fall from space? Below,
Baumgartner’s report, delivered at the post-leap press conference, of
what he was thinking, saying, and feeling during the event. Standing on the platform of the capsule, looking down at earth and ready to jump:
"When i was standing there on top of the world you become so humble--the
only thing you want is to come back alive. You don’t want to die in
front of your parents, your girlfriend and all those people.” What he said at that moment:
"I know the whole world is watching now and i wish the world could see
what I see…Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how
small you are.” What he felt like getting ready to jump:
"When you’re up there you’re already exhausted--I never anticipated it would be so tough." The feeling of traveling really fast--and then going into that horrible spin:
"It started out good--my exit was perfect,” he said. After a planned
tumble, he began, for reasons he didn’t know at the time, spinning out
of control. "For some reason the spin became violent. When you’re in
that pressure suit--pressurized at 3.5 psi--you don’t feel the air. It’s
like swimming without touching the water.” Trying to correct the spin
at first just make it worse, but Baumgartner eventually managed to right
himself.
Asked if he felt he was in trouble during the descent, Baumgarnter
says yes, but he was thinking through the choice of pulling an emergency
chute or going for the speed record. "I have a manual button, where I
can release a drogue shoot to pull me out of the spin. But then it’s all
over; I’m not going to fly supersonic." The choice was: "push that
button and stay alive or get it under control.” The feeling of going supersonic:
"It’s hard to describe because I can’t feel it… if you want to judge
speed you need reference points; I had none of those." (because of the
suit).
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