In 2012 Red Bull, the energy drink brand, changed the way we approached online advertising. Instead of producing a lower-budget version of their television ads, what other major brands were trialling at that time, they put their budget into a story that emotionally communicated their brand. More similar in tone to personal videos uploaded to YouTube and Social Media platforms, “Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic freefall from 128k” has clocked more than 41million views to date.
This was a very successful example of what Marketers refer to as a “Tentpole Event”. A project that is centered around one live stream, or one place/time or one piece of content. Event marketing can create a huge reach and put a brand on the map literally overnight. But what do you do for the other 364 days of the marketing year? Consider the buzz and excitement around an annual event such as the Super Bowl. Unless you’re a mega-fan, how often does it cross your mind in the off season?
That was the “good old days”, the very beginning of online video and branded content, and as the predominance of video in marketing continues to grow rapidly, major brands including Red Bull are now taking a different approach.
Tubular is an online ranking website that collects data about the performance of brands across the web. If you take a look at Red Bull’s statistics they impressively rank #1 as the most watched brand of the month more than any other brand. In fact in the past year, they’re ranked either #1 or #2 every single month.
What is behind this success? The brand’s shift from Tentpole Events to Hub Marketing. It’s a shift from one major release every 6-12 months to a whole lot more content released almost daily. A move from a one-off Live Youtube event, to a collection of smaller stories produced for specific, niche audiences and for specific platforms. Sure this has meant smaller viewer numbers per piece of content, but collectively they’re getting more eyeballs and more engagement than ever before. In the past 12 months, across all their online content Red Bull has generated more than 2.5 billion views and 50.2 million engagements. To match that, Felix Baumgartner would have to leap from a rocket about 60 times. They sacrificed quality (in relation to a single project’s budget), and focused on quantity and are winning.
Reading this, you might be thinking that a company the size of Red Bull has 100x the budget of your company. If space jumps aren’t in your price range don’t panic. You can still apply this new approach to your video marketing strategies, here’s three tips to get your thinking:
- Think beyond an all-in-one video solution: instead work with a production company that understands the importance of creating content that can be used to cut into offshoots tailored to your social media platforms and the micro-demos within your main audience.
- Don’t sacrifice Production Quality: your videos represent your business, if they look cheap and B-grade, so will your service or products. Don’t produce 10 x budget videos, instead invest in a professional quality product that can be repurposed 10 times.
- Consistency is still king: we are bombarded with information and advertising every waking second of our days – it’s challenging to be seen let alone remembered. The key to overcoming this is to post quality and on-brand content consistently.
By the way, Front Runner Films is that type of Production Company – we can work with your budget to tell your story with the highest quality video production and a deep understanding of the needs of online marketing today and how those needs are evolving. Want to know more? Shoot us an email (info@frontrunnerfilmsllc.com) or give us a call.
