How Red Bull Owns Topline Awareness With Billions Of Insight-Driven Video Views.
Being the pioneer and leader in a category you originated brings both benefits and challenges. Red Bull faced a similar scenario as the forerunner in the energy drink industry, and pioneer of the approach of creating an online media empire to fuel topline awareness and brand affinity. While being at the forefront is advantageous, it also involves specific challenges. For Red Bull this translated to a difficulty in tracking the shifting online behaviour and preferences of audiences across 15+ distinct areas of focus (skate, surf, snow, music, etc), effectively programming the right digital channels for those audiences, while also operating digital teams in dozens of countries globally.
Elsbethen, Austria
Food & Beverage, Media
Pioneering a Media Brand That Powers Product Sales
Red Bull, a well-known energy drink company originating from Austria, has made a significant mark on the global beverage industry. Established in 1987, Red Bull has earned widespread acclaim for its distinctive energy drink and innovative marketing strategies—essentially pioneering the energy drink category. The brand is defined by its dedication to high-energy ingredients, cutting-edge packaging, and a dynamic approach to lifestyle and vitality. Red Bull's unique fusion of inspiration and lifestyle has cultivated a loyal fan base, positioning it as a frontrunner in the energy drink market, with a diverse array of products tailored to various energy needs and consumer preferences.
As a global media brand, insights are at the heart of Red Bull’s DNA
but keeping up with the insights needs of a sprawling, insight-driven global organization is a huge challenge.
Insights at the Speed of Culture
Red Bull’s Media House doesn’t just react to culture, it creates it.
But playing the part of digital media powerhouse in over 15+ areas of sport and culture simultaneously—not to mention with a truly global footprint—is no small task.
The global audience insights team at Red Bull is tasked with supporting the programming and digital strategy of not only every sport and culture team globally, but country-specific digital teams as well. Oh right, and the global leadership team as well. To say they’re busy is an understatement.
Ultimately, their goal is to power the strategy of every team with insights to achieve ambitious increases in topline awareness, consideration, and brand love across the board.
There were two key challenges:
Providing holistic insights that give a complete picture of the digital landscape—there are hundreds of SaaS tools and data sources available on the market, they all have pros, but also major flaws, and they typically aren’t cheap.
Providing their teams with insights that are concise, actionable, and timely—all at a pace that is nothing less than staggering, due to serving literally hundreds of stakeholders across various media and country teams.
With dozens of audiences and geographies to tackle, and major competitive hurdles to overcome, the Red Bull Audience Insights team approached RightMetric for an insights solution that was flexible, impactful, and scalable.
That’s a lot of insights to derive and little room for Red Bull’s insights team to flex their creativity.
x Audience and competitor insights x 15 sport & cultural niches
x 100+ countries
= 3000+ insight needs
An On-Demand Insights Solution That’s Scalable, While Remaining Impactful
Red Bull has been a RightMetric partner from the very start. Together, we’ve gone through hundreds of iterations on what an effective global insights program should look like and focus on. It’s really been the genesis of RightMetric’s model today:
Insights Customized to Any Specific Target Audience or Competitive Set:
To adapt to whichever niche, team, or country within the Red Bull media organization needs strategic direction at the moment.
Access to a Holistic, Ever-Evolving Data Set:
To create truly impactful content that keeps pace with and drives culture, one can’t rely on a single data source alone (ex. Social media). By bringing together dozens of data sources across every digital channel including social, search, web, email, partnerships, podcast, apps, and more; we can derive more accurate insights that get to the heart of what makes our audience tick.
Fast and On-Demand:
Insights are like ingredients in a recipe. High quality ingredients create a great strategy, but they expire if you don’t use them while they’re fresh. Culture, and the digital environment surrounding it is changing constantly. So we built our model to provide Red Bull with insights not on a pre-schedule basis, but only when they needed them and asked for exactly what was most relevant and urgent at any given time. This kept the insights fresh and actionable, to drive truly impactful digital strategy to reach audiences where they’re at today, not yesterday.
Done For You AND With You:
Red Bull’s Audience Insights team is always swamped with requests, so we built our model to take as much work off their plate as possible to allow them to focus on high level management and interpretation of insights, while also offering human support from our team of whip smart strategists and researchers, whenever they need us to flex in.
RightMetric and Red Bull continue executing and iterating on our successful partnership today, based on these principles.
The window into whitepsace opportunities is superb. To get this level of insight into tactic and content takeaways is invaluable — love it!
Examples of The Research
With such a high volume of audience and competitor insights being generated in partnership, it’s hard to choose examples, but here are a few:
Owning Topline Awareness While Generating Billions Of Insight-Driven Video Views & Online Engagements
In the 4+ years we’ve worked together, Red Bull’s media teams have generated results with their digital strategies that are nothing short of world class.
Red Bull’s video views number well into the billions annually, and have continued to grow at +18% YoY despite that staggering scale, maintaining the #1 spot in topline awareness for all key audiences.
Strategic insight that helps my team move fast without hesitation
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