A snowboarder floats upside down over a thicket of
trees and sticks his hand out
to brush the top of a tall pine.
He does so casually, like it’s
just something one does, and
a high-speed camera catches the treetop
bend to the unfamiliarity. It’s a captivating
sequence—so much so that you might forget
the Red Bull logo on the helicopter he rode
in on. Not to worry: In this, and the hundreds
of other don’t-even-try-it-in-your-dreams
sequences in the 2011 film The Art of Flight,
there are plenty of opportunities to gaze
upon the energy drink’s logo.
Red Bull didn’t pay someone for this
product placement. Its content arm, Red
Bull Media House, made the film for a
reported $2 million—then directly reaped
the benefits when Flight reigned atop
i Tunes’s sports, documentary, and overall
movie sales charts for a week, at $10 a pop.
Now that there’s no longer a firm line
between content makers and the brands
that glom on, every company, from American
Express to Burger King, seems encouraged to
consider itself a media company. But no one
has taken the mandate as seriously as Red
Bull. It launched Media House in Europe in
2007, and expanded stateside last year. In
2011 alone, it filmed movies, signed a partnership deal with NBC for a show called Red
Bull Signature Series, developed reality-TV
ideas with big-time producer Bunim/Murray,
honed its own web and mobile outlets, and
became a partner in YouTube’s new plan to
publish original content. It also expanded its
magazine, Red Bulletin, into the U.S., giving it
a global distribution of 4. 8 million.
“They are as good an example as exists of
a brand pulling off being a media creator,”
says Noah Brier, cofounder of Percolate, which
helps brands create content for their social
followers. While serving as
head of strategy at digital
agency the Barbarian Group,
Brier worked on the redesign of
Red Bull’s brand site. “Actually,
they’re getting to the point
Scenes from
Red Bull’s digital-media library,
an instantly de-ployable archive
of high energy
120 fastcompany.com march 2012
