This is simply brilliant work by the Red Bull team. If you haven’t heard about Red Bull Stratos, do yourself a favor and watch this 4-minute video trailer. In a nutshell:
Felix Baumgartner will attempt to free fall then parachute from 23 miles above Earth
If successful, he will break several 50-year old records held by Colonel Joe Kittinger
This project is completely underwritten and produced by Red Bull
Yes – Red Bull has upped the ante in the content department with a pretty compelling story. In fact, this trailer feels very much like what you’d expect to see as a high quality movie preview. But what’s most amazing here is that Red Bull is producing this alone – no big corporate media halo, no online media partner to ensure distribution, no A-list Hollywood producer name to lean on. It’s Red Bull’s gig and they’re going all-in.
The “safe” thing to do would have been to partner with some big media outlet, if for no other reason than to guarantee coverage and distribution. But the story is so darn compelling, that Red Bull has the license to go direct.
I see this as the wave of the future — brands investing in world-class content that is intimately linked to their equity and serving it straight up to consumers. Not all brands, but those like Red Bull, Porsche, Nintendo and others that have authentic products, a crystal clear positioning and a base of die-hard loyalists.
Kudos to the Red Bull team and to @kdoohan who leads digital marketing (Kevin is also a ConAgra Foods alum). Should be fun to see this unfold.
Wordle is a free web service that generates a “word cloud” using a website, blog or text document as raw input. Here is the Wordle for the Brandcentric blog. I found it interesting to compare the content in the Wordle to the blog tag cloud located in the right column of this web page. The tag cloud is driven by key word tags that I define when posting each blog entry, while the Wordle scrapes the entire blog and builds a cloud from the ground up. Given the similarity between the two, looks like I am (for the most part) selecting the most relevant blog tags.
I love this story: Two unemployed brothers with no formal advertising experience outwit Madison Avenue for the top ranked Super Bowl ad honors. According to the USA Today’s Ad Meter program, the “Free Doritos” spot produced by Joe and Dave Herbert for the Frito Lay ad contest scored an 8.46, beating agencies representing Anheuser Busch, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Kellogg’s and Taco Bell. Who said consumer generated media couldn’t be taken seriously?
And on a related note, even during this recessionary environment Superbowl ad spending continues to defy all logic. This year we saw record $6MM per minute ($100k/second) rates, among the 28 represented advertisers. While those are some mighty big numbers, I’m fairly certain Frito Lay isn’t complaining about this year’s media spend.
This video is fascinating on many levels. First, it features relatively young kids teaching a cooking lesson in a surprisingly well-scripted and produced video. Second, this video is part of a series distributed via YouTube, and apparently has amassed quite a following judging by the viewer comments. Finally, while there is no commercial endorsement (other than their own Spatulatta brand), I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing some subtle (or not so subtle) product placement in future episodes. That could have been Pam Cooking Spray featured during the first 15 seconds!
