Red Bull Gives You Rings

Energy drink maker uses mobile campaign to drive awareness of “build-a-thon” contest

From flugtags to x-fighters, Red Bull pumps out wacky marketing events around the world like it’s downed way too much of its homebrew.

From July 7-10, it raised the bar with “Red Bull Creation,” a creativity contest held in a Brooklyn park that pitted 16 teams of the country’s most way-out “hackers, tinkerers and fabricators” in a three-day “build-a-thon.”

The teams were given a theme—“energy in motion”—the night before the competition kicked off, and then had 72 hours to build whatever they’d dreamed up—the weirder, the better.

The event’s mindset is perfectly illustrated by the winning entry from a Minneapolis team called 1.21 Jigawatts. Red Bull described it as a “massive hamster wheel, wired into a mobile network, given its own phone number that received up to 60,000 one-word text messages at a time.” Upon receiving a text message, the wheel would begin rolling and print out a perfect copy of the word on the ground.

Practical, schmactical. 1.21 Jigawatts beat out other entries, including a wheelie-popping shopping cart and a mechanical inchworm named Chillerpillar, on the basis of being “unequivocally awesome.”

Red Bull’s promotional campaign was pretty creative itself. Before the event, it posted ads with QR (quick response) codes on bus shelters all around New York City. Passersby who scanned the code with a mobile device were redirected to a video promoting the event. The campaign seemed to work; on the final day of the event the teams finished their projects onstage before a packed house

Red Bull is no stranger to unique mobile promotions. Last year, it targeted Formula 1 fans with a new racing game built for iPhones and iPod Touchs. This year, it participated in a campaign at 1,400 Canadian convenience stores that delivered instant coupons to shoppers carrying Bluetooth-enabled devices.

— Bob Pickard