Red Bull, Bullish on Branded Content

Ryan Doyle is one of the world’s most original and innovative free runners and parkour artists. He shows his skills in the above video, shot in Mardin, Turkey for Red Bull.

Rather than heavy-handed product placement, Red Bull continues to go for high-end content, richly filmed and exciting to watch, with an aesthetic gestalt that fits the brand attributes.

"It's an efficiency product. I'm talking about improving endurance, concentration, reaction time, speed, vigilance, and emotional status. Taste is of no importance whatsoever," says the mastermind behind it all, Austrian, Dietrich Mateschitz, credited with creating the energy drink category.

The video received almost 250,000 views in the first few days after release, and a Red Bull can appears only briefly as does the logo on Doyle’s clothes.

Parkour, a style of movement focused on navigating around and through daunting obstacles with speed and efficiency, was developed in France. Traceurs (parkour practitioners) are trained to quickly identify alternate routes and efficient pathways by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping.

In this spot, snowboarding athlete Travis Rice is featured with footage from Red Bull’s first feature-length documentary on snowboarding, “The Art of Flight,” to be released in U.S. theaters.

Rice is #13 on Snowboarder Magazine’s list of the Top Twenty Most Influential Riders and is considered the Paul Revere of the big mountain freestyle movement.

Red Bull’s international marketing campaign sponsors a range of extreme sports athletes including BMX, motocross, snowboarding, wakeboarding, cliff-diving, Formula 1 racing, as well as breakdancing, art shows, music, and video games.

Targeted to young males, celebrities such as Eminem and extreme athletes like Doyle and Rice promote a cool and bold brand befitting the slogan "it gives you wings."

Mateschitz calls the current branded entertainment push, "our most important line extension so far. As a major content provider, it is our goal to communicate and distribute the 'World of Red Bull' in all major media segments, from TV to print to new media to our music record label."

The Red Bull Air Force skydives into the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas.

“When it comes to producing video most people think about what they want to see themselves and how to get their company message across at all costs. Red Bull does the opposite. It thinks about making content that its audience will want to see and figures out how to remove as much branding as possible.”

Red Bull invented the category and is rewriting the playbook on extreme, branded content.