Content — the best word to happen in marketing (you need to read to the end)

When Red Bull launched The Red Bulletin Formula One magazine in 2005, free content was a pretty alien concept. Napster had gone lawful in Europe in 2004, YouTube launched the year after and Facebook wasn’t open to everyone until 2006. These were nascent times in content marketing — content marketing just wasn’t a thing at all.

So printing a free magazine was an interesting foray into the field by the energy drinks company. They’d already worked with influencers (F1 driver Gerhard Berger was the first athlete on their books in 1989) and done the traditional team sponsorship with Sauber F1 team from 1995. The magazine was part of a strategy to shake up what had become a staid sport. Red Bull hosted parties at every race (nice early experiential marketing), brought girls — young women — trackside (the Formula Unas was a reconstructed concept to add old school glamour back to the grid) and a hospitality area, the Energy Station, which towered above its rival and also welcomed its rivals’ team-mates in to sample food, drinks and more parties. This open hospitality was, again, a novelty.

But the Red Bulletin was successful because it was both pioneering and done with a precise knowledge of its audience (the F1 Paddock personnel) and how to present its content: reverential to the sport, drivers and teams, while satirical about its risible aspects: TV commentators, petty politics, paddock fashion/lack of. These two are an absolute requirement for content marketing: failure to know who your audience is and what they consume is going to result in, well… failure.

From Red Bull’s F1 magazine was born a generalist lifestyle publication, also The Red Bulletin, while the company invested in TV stations, a film arm, and began to revamp its websites producing and commissioning content which reflected the Brand’s values. It was giving wings to creators as well as energy drinks consumers and the consumption of content was becoming as vital as the consumption of the drink.

Arguably the golden era for Red Bull began in 2007 with the launch of the subsequently much-imitated Media House — when Red Bull Racing started moving up the Formula One grid and Felix Baumgartner was breaking freefall, and online viewing, records for his Stratos leap from space. Few other brands had recognised the impact or had the budget (or the boardroom bravery) to follow down this content marketing path.

That golden era was obviously going to pass as other companies woke up to what content associated with a brand could do for its consumers.

So what now in a saturated market, with every brand believing they can persuade consumers to personally engage, share their branded content and join in conversations? Like newsjacking ten years ago, this content marketing is definitely the right thing to do, but if everyone’s doing it how do you ensure you reach potential consumers and ensure that the content you’re producing is relevant and has any (not just some) return on investment?

It comes back to authenticity. It’s an overly used word in marketing, but real authenticity is knowing where not to publish as much as it is to be true to your brand values. We held off putting Red Bull Racing on to Facebook until 2010, not because I didn’t think our audience was there, but I wanted to ensure the content we served them was relevant, interesting, informative (the usual…) and differed from what we were already doing on Twitter and website.

Being authentic is not launching that TikTok channel because your brand does not belong there. It’s not creating an experiential marketing campaign, because your consumers do not need one. Well, they might like it, but them sharing an Instagram picture with your logo on it is hardly data-guided targeting.

You can spot the brands (and interestingly the musicians and bands) who have hired digitally native, demographically younger-than-the-consumer social operators. A content publisher/creator understands how to plan, produce and publish but they do not necessarily understand the brand and it audience. And vice versa: your old school head of marketing knows the brand inside out, but can they pull together a successful social campaign across the ever-evolving platforms and their ever-shifting algorithms? The balance is finding someone, or a team, who can do both: comprehend both brand and platform and know when not to publish.

I recently spoke to someone who was having trouble with their new head of marketing because said marketer wanted to be on social. This was a high-end, high-value manufacturer, unique in its field. Taking time to plan and execute their social strategy was never — never — going to increase awareness, engagement with their clients or sell any more units. But there was a push from new head of marketing to be on social without understanding the company, its brand and most importantly its consumers. Who weren’t looking for social interaction.

Red Bull was authentic to its brand, because its content marketing defined its brand. Mention Red Bull and the drink itself is third or fourth on the list of association: F1, Air Race, Stratos, skateboards… then the energy drink, the very category it pioneered. While most brands commence content marketing campaigns as a marketing add-on, Red Bull did it early on and invested in its events, athletes and teams. There is little in the way of straight advertising (its occasionally incongruous cartoon ads the exception) with Red Bull. It is, and always has been about espousing the lifestyle associated with the brand.

Is content for every brand? Tom Goodwin, EVP Innovation at Zenith recently threw the cat amongst LinkedIn’s thought-leadership pigeons when he stated “Content was the worst word to happen to advertising.”

He might be right about advertising. But for marketing, content remains one of the most vital things to have happened. Get it right and it allows brands to connect with consumers and new consumers and espouse the values it wants to be remembered for.