Red Bull Owner Dietrich Mateschitz. LISI NIESNER / Reuters
According to MSNBC, Red Bull sold 4.2 billion cans last year, including more than a billion in the States. “That represents a 7.9 percent increase over the year before, and revenues jumped 15.8 percent to $5.175 billion.”
The drink has made Founder Dietrich Mateschitz one of the world’s richest men and the richest in his native Austria. According to MSNBC, “at the end of 2004, he had just 2,605 employees; in 2010, Red Bull employed 7,758 people — which works out to more than $667,000 in revenue per person.”
Now Mateschitz is launching a new push focused on marketing his company through a serious media endeavor:
On May 15, subscribers to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle and New York Daily News found a magazine called Red Bulletin inserted in their Sunday papers. The 98-page glossy features a cover story on San Francisco Giants ace Tim Lincecum, as well as pieces on Bob Dylan, graffiti art and Russian BASE jumper Valery Rozov. Billed as “an almost independent monthly,” the magazine is a product of Red Bull Media House, a subsidiary media company launched in Austria in 2007 that expanded with a Los Angeles outpost this January.
Red Bull knows what it’s getting into. Over the years, it has produced TV programs (No Limits on ESPN), films (That’s It, That’s All), magazines, a website and a steady diet of Web videos featuring snowboarders, rally cars, surfers, cliff divers and concerts. Even so, its current ambitions reflect a serious ramping up, as well as the realization of a business plan that eschews conventional advertising in favor of marketing through its own events, shows, and publications. The company shipped more than 1.2 million copies of the first Red Bulletin in the U.S. (about one-third of Sports Illustrated’s paid circulation). This fall its first feature-length documentary, a look at snowboarding called The Art of Flight, will be released in U.S. theaters. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Bunim/Murray Productions, best known for creating the Real World reality-show franchise on MTV. The two are working on reality TV concepts for Red Bull athletes.
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Mateschitz calls the multimedia assault “our most important line extension so far. As a major content provider, it is our goal to communicate and distribute the ‘World of Red Bull’ in all major media segments, from TV to print to new media to our music record label.” He hopes Red Bull Media House will turn a profit, but, as with his sports teams, he’s willing to wait. “In literal financial terms, our sports teams are not yet profitable, but in value terms, they are,” he says. “The total editorial media value plus the media assets created around the teams are superior to pure advertising expenditures.”
