The Birth of Content Marketing (probably)
Content marketing began on Friday, July 29 2005. That was the day when a fast-moving consumer goods manufacturer turned the marketing world squarely on its head.
Nothing has been the same since. Post July 29, 2005 brands, personalities and companies began obsessing over producing text, images, whitepapers and videos to engage with not only their own consumers, but all their potential consumers. Social media subsequently became the petrol poured over that content marketing bonfire which the internet ignited.
July 29 2005 might not be the actual date content marketing kicked off, but it was the day I joined a travelling editorial office which visited every Formulas One race to produce four print magazines per grand prix weekend. Funded by energy drinks manufacturer Red Bull, our editorial programming was dominated not by their under-performing nascent F1 team — but by everything that happened on the track, in the host city and around the Paddock.
The latter is important because this was a magazine for Paddock personnel and party-goers only. (The Paddock? The behind-the-stands motorhome village where said personnel did professional and financial business). Despite the full editorial team, the mobile office which took two days constructing and the Heidelberg press which printed the magazines costing a fair amount to shift around the globe, our audience was simply those people who worked in the sport: the teams, drivers, catering staff, press and TV crews… it wasn’t meant for the sport’s spectators. Again, that would come later once reputation, demand and a would-be audience were generated.
It meant we would feature fanatical German fans getting up to some surreal shenanigans while camping in the forests surrounding Hockenheim, find the best nightspots in deepest, darkest rural Northamptonshire in the UK or run a page feature on the wildlife around the Montreal track. Interspersed with these slightly esoteric takes on motorsport were long features about great moments from the racing annals, interviews with current drivers, features on the unsung heroes and heroines, race reports and some fantastic photography.
There was a fair amount of scepticism from the other teams and from Red Bull’s F1 team itself. What was in it for Red Bull? Why was this magazine, printed on heavyweight matt paper, being given out for free? Why did we write about other teams? Why wasn’t the budget being spent on a new rear wing for the car? Red Bull Racing were a fair way off the podium, let alone the world championship at that stage — we had some way and five more years before that happened.
But the criticism didn’t harm the magazine team, it merely enhanced the reputation of us as flicking two fingers up at the establishment. Even though we were, funded by a team owner, very much a part of that establishment.
We didn’t always get it right. Some drivers didn’t like the satire (one got particularly offended about an image of him being enhanced and complained to the owner of Red Bull), some teams objected to our pointing out the inconvenient truth of their derisory grid position and one racer threatened to sue/beat us up over an allusion to the alleged professional status of some of his female party guests. But… but, we managed to retain a degree of marketing credibility among our rivals not previously seen. Perhaps because our targets were all-inclusive. We respected the sport and its heroes, but we were always happy to ridicule its more ridiculous elements. And personalities.
And we celebrated the controversial. Spanish driver Fernando Alonso was particularly aggrieved when we ran a less than complimentary story about him at the Japanese Grand Prix. So much so that when he did secure pole position he brandished a Red Bulletin magazine mocking us for getting it wrong. That image of Alonso flapping our magazine in front of TV cameras was the front cover of our first annual retrospective.
Perhaps because of its scarcity the magazine took on an infamous status. I’ve spoken to agencies, social channels, broadcasters and senior marketers who all talk of The Red Bulletin, what it did and how it did it. Though its formula was pretty simple — consistent tone, know who to target, who your audience is and employ some brilliant writers, photographers and illustrators. Oh, and don’t skimp on the quality.
From The Red Bulletin sprang a general lifestyle and sports magazine and much of the lessons we learned on the road in F1 were taken on board by the Red Bull Media House which went on to be a blueprint for in-house commissioning and creation of content: the Media House produces magazines, short and long format video, series and social media — but the seeds were sown back in a forest in the middle of a race track in Hungary surrounded by a group of locals living in caravans.
The establishment of the Media House in Austria reflected the decision to (heavily) invest in content. Content which espoused the brand rather than its product, which was happy to give platform to rivals, which built up audiences and brand loyalty online and offline rather than directly selling to them was all part of Red Bull’s marketing philosophy, a philosophy which could trace its origins back to the mobile magazine.
While Red Bull arguably trailblazed the content marketing evolution, its rivals soon caught on and caught up. While you’d be hard pushed to prove that every influencer strategy could be traced back to Red Bull sponsoring athletes, Red Bull and the Red Bull Media House certainly widened that path. The difficulty for some brands in following this model remains. You need to isolate your content marketing from your advertising department, from your revenue producers and most of all from your finance department. It’s a hard sell to claim that sending a man into space to jump out of a capsule is going to increase product sales. Even if you did smash the then YouTube viewing figures record. It requires a lot of investment, an editorial policy (yep, editorial rather than marketing policy), a big budget and consistency — of tone and publication frequency.
Our success was down to investment, belief and a very strong set of brand values. We took those three and flavoured them with an editorial tone which was part Private Eye, part The Face and part GQ. It’s nearly 15 years since The Red Bulletin presses first rolled, but the effects both for Red Bull and content marketing can still be seen. The need to cut through, to be different and to be remembered is one all brands face. We were lucky because we got in there early.
We never did make friends with Fernando Alonso sadly. And what happened on that German fan campsite in Hockenheim will, for the good of everyone involved, remain unpublished.
