Red Bull gives Felix wings

Red Bull firmly have their foot within extreme sports, showcasing their newest project on Sunday night with Austrian-born Felix Baumgartner free-falling 24-miles above the earth's surface. 

Felix Baumgartner pushed the boundaries of human limits by pioneering a new world record for the highest ever sky-dive. The jump involved a 3-hour journey in a stratospheric balloon before jumping out at over 120,000ft above the earth's surface where he reached terminal velocity at over 700mph. 

The world famous jump

It actually took the brand over 6 years to create and develop this idea, which included the world's leading minds in aerospace medicine, engineering, pressure suit development, capsule creation and balloon fabrication. Needlessly to say, it was a ballsy attempt by Felix with rumours that there was a 30s delay on the live feed in case they needed to cut the stream in the event of the worst happening. 

However, the fact that it was a brand initiating this madness is even more ballsy - most brands would have a coronary at the thought of an untested event which risked human life, but this is just part of every-day for Red Bull. Their strategic sponsorship and co-creation of extreme sports aligns with their current brand values of re-vitalising your body and mind and their apt comms positioning of 'Red Bull gives you wings'! 

Twitter conversations took off

This event showed the increasing popularity of content creation as oppose to a sponsorship badging exercise. In fact, Red Bull is a leader within this area as they were the first brand to move from sponsoring an F1 team to actually buying their own - a move which has proven to be very successful, especially in light of Sebastian Vettel's recent win in Korea. 

Creating your own content allows you limitless opportunities in terms of developing something newsworthy. The Stratos stunt alone triggered 3.1m tweets, 8 million tuned in to watch the event live and according to Forbes it generated tens of millions in global brand exposure. 

This clearly gets people engaging with the brand but does it shift enough cans? Only a sneaky-peek at Red Bull's sales data after an event like this would be able to show us how much it drives people to buy their products.

All in all, Red Bull is certainly leading the way in terms of innovative and mass engaging content, however, they have set a high bench mark - not only for other brands, but even for themselves!

Well done Felix!

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