Launched in North America just over a decade ago, Red Bull has found its event marketing niche in the last few years by celebrating unusual and extreme sports. The beverage brand hosted a full calendar of competitions and activations in 2009, starting with one of its biggest efforts to date.
Despite maintaining significant branding initiatives outside of the sporting world with a pop-up venue in New York and its annual after-hours concert series during South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, the company’s biggest obligation is to its sports tie-ins. Red Bull employs sports marketing heads in five U.S. regions, where they produce their own large public events and competitions.
In 2009 alone, Red Bull hosted sporting events that ranged from an intimate skateboarding competition tour to a soapbox derby that brought 110,000 spectators to downtown Los Angeles. However, the brand’s biggest undertaking of all—both in production and preparation—was its Snowscrapers snowboarding competition in New York last February.
Snowscrapers required a month of 24-hour snow-making, the construction of a nine-story ramp in a city park, and the corralling of several media partners to ensure the event was broadcast around the country. In exchange for all of their work, organizers saw a capacity crowd of 20,000 stick around for the daylong event in freezing temperatures.
At the time, Red Bull’s head of Northeast sports marketing, Jeff Regis, offered insight into how all these events come together. “A lot of our staff, including myself—we’re all athletes,” he said. “We’re all still participating and active in sports, and a lot of these projects come from the minds of our athletes.”
Red Bull’s commitment to sports is unusual for the variety of activities it includes. One of the brand’s bigger initiatives for the last quarter of the year will bring break-dancers from around the world to New York for its first B-boy competition, Red Bull BC One.
