

RedBull Creation, hardware hacking contest - nyellin
http://www.redbullusa.com/cs/Satellite/en_US/001242969629749

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oldstrangers
RedBull has turned out to be one seriously cool company. They're almost like
what we all thought (hoped?) Google was going to turn into.

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phreeza
Red Bull spends a lot of money on _seeming_ cool. Some of their stuff is neat,
but in the end its just marketing. Their core business is still selling
overpriced energy drinks.

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daeken
Google spends a lot of money on _seeming_ cool. Some of their stuff is neat,
but in the end its just marketing. Their core business is still selling
overpriced advertisements.

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phreeza
Google has some cool core technology. In a way most of it is a vehicle to
sell/target ads, sure, but the relationship between their cool stuff and
revenue source is a lot closer than with Red Bull.

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nchlswu
I love RedBull's approach to sponsorships and marketing. Like many others, I
really think they just get it.

RedBull sponsors such a wide variety of activities, it's amazing. They hold
tonnes of mainstream pop culture events, and then have events like these and
other obscure sports/hobbies. Not only that, they do a very good job at
executing these events as well. That said, is the market for RedBull that big?
Sometimes I have trouble grasping how they do so much aside from their core
business while being profitable. These events probably cost less to promote in
total than I think, and I'm assuming RedBull does have a high markup, but am I
missing something?

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showerst
A big part of advertising is convincing thought-leaders (marketing speak for
'the cool kids' in a given social sphere) to use your product.

If spending $60,000 on a series of events gets two or three 'cool' people to
promote the product, who in turn influence even just 1000 followers to become
regular drinkers, then it's paid for itself.

I think in the US a (single) can of red bull at a gas station is around three
bucks, so at a 30% cut a roughly can-a-day habit earns them at least $1000 a
year. (Making some big simplifications about transport/retailers cuts).

Combine that with big mass of people who might buy a can or two a week (and
thus might be easier to influence) and you can see why sponsoring cheap, high-
influencer events like extreme sports and niche music/hobbies that trickle
down is a pretty clever marketing strategy.

Pabst Blue Ribbon is a great example of this same strategy, they were a cheap
redneck beer until they started sponsoring a string of low volume indie
rock/fashion events in the big cities, and made sure that drinking it would be
'ironic', and now they're hugely popular with young people.

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lowglow
I'm quite impressed at the amount of thought given to the invitation. Is there
a site that is cataloging the easter eggs as they are found? Can anyone
identify some of the circuit components from the video?

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beagle3
[http://charliex2.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/redbull-
marketing-...](http://charliex2.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/redbull-marketing-
whats-the-latest-craze-campaign/) has some info

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zheng
Red Bull is a really cool company, even though I don't like energy drinks. Did
you know they have a record label? It seems like one of those things where
someone said "Yeah and we should have a record label..." and then poof! It
exists.

<http://www.redbullrecords.com/>

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krondor
I am not clear how the online qualifier differs, but they ran a portion of
this for hackerspaces. I'm involved with i3Detroit and while I didn't
contibute to this RedBull challenge, I had a lot of fun watching other members
crack the challenge.

Details; [http://www.i3detroit.com/taking-the-red-bull-by-the-horns-
ac...](http://www.i3detroit.com/taking-the-red-bull-by-the-horns-achievement-
unlocked)

I'm sure whatever the online challenge is would be significantly different. I
doubt RedBull would be sending puzzle boxes to all participants.

