Red Bull Brand Dissemination

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Red Bull Brand Dissemination

How does the Red Bull brand engage with its fans through

extreme sport video content on social media and on the Red

Bull TV website?

A cross-platform study of the most-engaging videos

Master in New Media and Digital culture

Faculty of Humanities

Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)

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Master Thesis

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Arnaud Muller

June 2017

Supervisor: mw. dr. Anne Helmond Second reader: dhr. dr. Niels van Doorn

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Abstract

This research combines the study of the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook pages, the Red Bull YouTube channel and the digital video service website Red Bull TV to analyse how video content is used by the brand in order to engage with its fans online. The videos that raised the highest engagement number on social media have been taken as case studies in order to understand not only how the Red Bull brand engages with its fans, but also what type of content its fans interact with. By means of a content analysis concerning the potential emotional charge, segmentation, electronic word of mouth and brand networks surrounding the videos displayed by the brand, a study has been made of how fans and brands interact on social media. On the website, the concepts of interface and affordances provide further insight into the possible interactions between fans and brands online. The use of a digital method approach enabled the structure of information and helped to analyse how Red Bull manages its brand identity through fan participation in extreme sport video content, on social media and on the Red Bull website.

Keywords: Affordances, engagement, Red Bull, Red Bull TV, fans, participatory culture,

brand identity, brand image, brand social identity, co-production, branded entertainment, emotional charge, electronic word of mouth, brand networks, used-value lifestyle, segmentation, niche sport.

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I. Introduction

On the 14 October 2012, the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner broke a world record by jumping out of a balloon from the stratosphere reaching the speed of sound in his free fall

back to Earth1. But another record was broken that day: the live stream on the YouTube

social media platform reached “eight million concurrent views (…), marking the highest-ever

concurrent viewing figure on the Google-owned site.”2 In partnership with the Red Bull

energy drink, this project entitled “Red Bull Stratos” cost the company around 50 million

euro, according to estimations provided by the German Newspaper Handelsblatt.3

This investment in the “Red Bull Stratos” project exemplifies the peculiar marketing strategy the brand is using as well as the global culture it has built around the single product company in order to engage with consumers. Moreover, the live YouTube broadcast of Baumgartner’s jump illustrates how video content can be effectively used by brands to reach or engage with online customers. As reported by Joon Ian Wong, one of the main reasons for the increasing use of video content online by brands in the past two decades is the Content Delivery Network (CDN) evolution. This technological change has allowed video content to be updated online and viewed without interruptions “by reducing the distance it has to travel to

a viewer”, becoming “buffer-free” experiences (Wong, Ian Joon). This innovation has made

the online video experience much more engaging and enjoyable for users and for this reason it is increasingly used by companies to share consumer-interactive videos to convey a brand message. Additionally, since the early 2000s, as stated by Pletikosa and Michahelles, “the rise and continued growth of Social Networks have attracted the interest of companies who

see the potential to transmit theirmarketing messages to the customers” (843). In this digital

context, this study will focus on how the Red Bull brand engages with consumers through online video entertainment.

Back in 1976, when the Thai energy drink called Krating Daeng - meaning ‘Red Bull’ in Thai - was created by Chaleo Yoovidhya, the CEO of TC Pharmaceutical, he detected that “the

energy products are quite interesting and has a growth potential in Thailand market.”4_A

couple of years later, on April 1987, with the help of Dietrich Mateschitz, the Red Bull 1 http://www.redbullstratos.com/the-mission/world-record-jump/ 2 http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/red-bull-stratos-skydive-smashes-youtube-records/1154746#GqDSmS62ewU8uEH1.99 3 http://www.handelsblatt.com/panorama/aus-aller-welt/ted-bull-stratos-teddybaer-schlaegt-felix-baumgartner/8704042.html 4 http://export.redbullthailand.com/index.php/corporate/data

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energetic drink entered the market in Austria.5 Only two years after Red Bull’s introduction

into the market, the Formula 1 Driver Gerhard Berger became the very “first Red Bull

sponsored athlete.”6 Today the brand sponsors 666 athletes across 67 countries and sold

more than 6 billion cans in 2016 (Appendix, figures 1 and 2). Moreover, in the 1980s, the decade when Red Bull was created, brand advertising was conceptualised, in the opinion of Celia Lury, as a creative field that “aimed to construct for consumers an imaginary lifestyle within which the emotional and aesthetic values of the product were elaborated” (20). Taking this statement on board, Red Bull has since its inception managed to surround the single beverage with a lifestyle and a mind-set of pushing the limits of sport performances by giving its consumer “wings”.

The company’s marketing has become expansive and diversified not only by sponsoring celebrated athletes, but also by supporting major team sports. Red Bull even owns soccer, hockey and auto racing teams, and has become renowned for organizing events and

competitions around the world. In May 2017, the Red Bull official website7 included 28

countries where more than 184 upcoming events were about to take place (Appendix, figure 3). Those events, “which involve young, extreme and ‘high speed’ sport disciplines such as

free climbing, snowboard, kite surf, acrobatic flight, as well as an international tour of football freestyle” associated with the energetic drink product, “strengthens the energy drink’s

image” according to Zagnoli and Radicchi (11-12). Moreover, the general video editing and aesthetic techniques used by the brand emphasize the extreme lifestyle surrounding the drink. Hence, the purpose of this study is to proceed to an analysis of the video content Red Bull displays online and the interactions of its users.

Following this introduction, the next chapter will give an overview of the existing literature regarding brand management by discussing mainly the notions of fans and brands interactions. Contextualising branded entertainment and its close relationship with video advertising is necessary because it represents not only an important part of brand management but also reveals a better understanding of the content displayed by Red Bull. Defining the terms fans and brands is the second crucial step in order to understand their relationship. Through the notion of participatory culture expressed by Henry Jenkins and the growing importance of consumer participation online, fans are seen as active consumers participating in the construction of a brand. Considering brands as immaterial objects will allow me to look at the co-creation of Red Bull’s social identity in close relationship with fan’s conception of the brand image. Finally, the literature on sport related content and especially 5 http://energydrink.redbull.com/red-bull-history 6 Ibidem 7 https://www.redbull.com/en

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niche sports will help me to understand how a type of content can reach a more homogenous

and easily targeted audience potentially eager to engage more with the content as explained by Miloch and Lambrecht (147). User-generated content and engagement will thus illustrate how the brand uses the participation and co-production of the users to interact through a specific brand identity.

This research discerns itself in two ways. Firstly, although various studies have investigated the Red Bull “phenomenon” and its marketing strategy “in the digital environment”, Kunz, Elsässer and Santomier or Sanchis-Roca’s articles for example, less attention has been paid to the video content displayed by the brand in terms of niche sports and consumers possible affordances or engagement with it. Secondly, very little research has been done on Red Bull’s social media using digital methods such as Netvizz, The YouTube Data Tool and

Gephi.8 This digital method approach intends to exemplify and fill the gap between the prior

literature on fans and brands interactions and the video content available on Red Bull’s online platforms. Also, the freely accessible online tools used to extract the data makes this research reproducible for future research purposes.

In order to look at how the Red Brand engages with its fans through extreme sport video content, the aim of this research is to analyse how online users can interact on websites or on social media in different ways through using varying digital methods. On the Red Bull TV website, the concept of affordances will be used to understand the possible actions the website affords and encourages the users to do. On social media, I will look mainly at the characteristics of the most popular videos posted by the Red Bull brand.

The Red Bull TV website is better understood in the context of Red Bull Media House, an umbrella brand of Red Bull. This “multi-platform media company with a focus on sports,

culture, and lifestyle”9_{creates in their own words “premium content”. The website section}

of this study thus focuses on an umbrella brand that manages a variety of products such as the Red Bull Content Pool, Red Bull Mobile, Red Bull TV, RedBull.com, The Red Bulletin, Red Bull Records, Servus TV and many others. Studying an umbrella brand of a limited liability company is challenging due to a lack of information online. Nevertheless, looking at

the website’s changing interface over time through the Wayback Machine tool10 as well as

the features allowing users to engage with content enables to encapsulate fans and brands interactions. 8 https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDatabase 9 https://www.redbullmediahouse.com/company/about.html 10 http://wayback.archive.org./

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7 Within social media, it is essential to identify if emotionally charged or targeted videos displayed on the Red Bull platforms in the shape of various niche sports and event-related videos have an impact on fans’ engagement. The engagement will be “measured by number of likes, comments and shares” on social media platforms according to Pletikosa and Michahelles (843). Taking on board the brand networks, meaning how Red Bull positions itself on the Facebook and YouTube platforms as well as the concept of electronic word of

mouth will reveal the lifestyle surrounding the brand and consumer’s co-production in the brand identity. After preliminary research that resulted in an overview of the brand’s sphere,

detailed in the ‘Description of the methods’ section, I decided to focus on the video content displayed on the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook brand pages, as well as the official Red Bull YouTube channel.

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II. Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

It is of prime importance to grasp some major concepts within the literature relating to brand management and online video content in order to better understand how the Red Bull brand engages with its fans through video content online. The literature used in this research will therefore not only cover the use and context of video content displayed by brands online, but will also focus on the concepts of “fans” and “brands” and see how they have been defined in prior literature. Through these concepts, it will be possible to understand how the Red Bull brand engages with its fans online. Finally, looking at concepts related to the type of content that Red Bull displays online will help to analyse the impact of a particular type of video content on fans and brands interactions on social media, as well as the Red Bull TV website.

To have a better understanding of the relatively recent history of video entertainment generated and put online by brands, it is necessary to contextualise the early relationship between video content produced by brands in general and its reception by its viewers. At the end of the twentieth century, through television, users already had a particular perception of video content displayed by brands. Due to technological inventions such as the digital video recorder (DVR), video on demand (VOD) and later, Internet protocol television (IPTV), users were accustomed to having a selection of content. Allowing viewers to have a “30-second skip-ahead button” at the very end of the twentieth century caused a change in people’s way of watching video advertising. It was now considered as highly “disruptive to TV programming” by the general viewers, as stated by Dave Evans (10). Consequently, this technological change transformed the relationship between advertising video content and viewers, as the latter were now able to “skip” or “fast forward” the ads.

On top of this, one of the major shifts for advertising video content, in the opinion of Richter, Riemer and vom Brocke, was the advent of online social networks in the early 2000s. It provided a new opportunity for brands to reach viewers by “facilitating targeted approaches and viral marketing” (98). This meant that social networks allowed brands to engage with particular categories of consumers who had mostly lost confidence in advertising videos and had started to “distrust advertising messages” (Clemons, Barnett and Appadurai 269). Through social networks, it was possible for brands to reach consumers on a platform where they could benefit from consumers’ trust in each other. As reported by Clemons, Barnett and

Appadurai,“social networks are trusted because of shared experiences and the perception

of shared values or shared needs” (268). Relying on recommendations of friends, family members or acquaintances, social networks allowed brands to insert themselves into a more personal environment where connecting people was the very essence of those platforms. In

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9 the words of Pletikosa and Michahelles, “Social networks, as part of Web 2.0 technology, provide the technological platform for the individuals to connect, produce and share content online” (843). In addition to this, social media platforms such as Facebook gave the opportunity to create brand pages which allowed brands to be part of these connections. Brands could hence improve and expand their interaction with customers by inserting advertising video content into this new context.

On social media platforms, which have essentially connecting and recreational purposes, “the entertainment value (…) is also an important factor for using it”, according to De Vries, Gensler, and Leeflang (85). Content that is entertaining, meaning content that amuses and also interests, is a key element in consumers’ use of and participation in social media platforms, as explained by Gensler et al.: “entertainment is an important motive for consumers to contribute and create content” (248). Within that context and in the opinion of Samuel and David Hudson, “the entertainment industry has proliferated, and entertainment is now distributed and consumed through a variety of media” (491). Because of the co-evolution and adaptation of video entertainment and consumers’ participation, the possibilities for displaying video content through social networks have become plentiful. Moreover, and as stated by Irena Pletikosa, “entertainment and information were found to be among the main motivations for online engagement over brand-related content in the form of consumption, creation, and contribution” (846). The Hudsons state that “these changes have opened the door to integrated advertising” within the video entertainment industries (491). Integrated advertising is thus the combination of advertising and entertainment videos, and it introduces specific kinds of advertising methods, such as

product placement, within entertaining videos. This means that the product that the company

is selling, such as a drink, appears on one or multiple occasions in the video. This phenomenon of merging advertising with entertainment, according to the Hudsons, “has been labelled ‘branded entertainment’ by the industry” (491). Also based on the definition of Samuel and David Hudson, branded entertainment can be understood more broadly as the “integration of advertising into entertainment content, whereby brands are embedded into storylines of a film, television program, or other entertainment medium” (492). In the case of Red Bull, this includes sport videos and live broadcasted events. With this understanding of the definition of branded entertainment, a significant part of the sport videos displayed on the Red Bull platforms, with their incorporation of the energy drink product together with the constant use of the Red Bull logo, can be recognized as branded entertainment videos. An understanding of the concept of branded entertainment is essential for investigating and analysing the interactions between Red Bull and its consumers, because their relationship is developed through a combination of advertising and entertainment. However, before

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10 analysing consumer and brand interaction through branded entertainment, it is also essential to acknowledge the concepts of “brands” and “fans”, and to understand their meanings based on prior definitions.

Red Bull can be considered as a brand because it is selling a product, the Red Bull energy drink, and the name ‘Red Bull’ is therefore essentially related to the product. However, based on Celia Lury’s argument, the concept of brand is more than just selling products, it “is something to which some feeling or action is directed’; it is an object-ive in that it is the object of “a purpose or intention” (1). Because of the purpose of a brand, which is to sell products by constantly adapting and evolving over time, the brand is, for Celia Lury, “a set of relations between products in time” (2).

Within this dynamic, the term brand is difficult to define on its own and is often associated with its purpose, products or image. A brand image is defined by Celia Lury as “the associations that a brand holds for consumers” (9-10) and requires therefore “practices of brand positioning” (67). In agreement with Peter Cheverton “the brand image is of course more than a picture or a logo; it is the range of associations triggered in your mind by that picture or logo” (9). When seeing the Red Bull logo, particular adjectives, types of sports and associations come to one’s mind, building therefore their brand image. This brand image and its associations therefore correspond to a part of the brand’s identity, which is defined

by Gensler et al. as “carefully selected attributes, benefits, and attitudes that are

communicated to consumers” by the brand, and that are supposed to be recognized by the consumer (243). This means that the brand’s identity is a vision which the brand communicates to its consumers, but which the consumers can relate to and contribute to according to their own vision of the brand image. In this context, the brand’s social identity can be understood as the integration of the consumers’ contribution - on social media for example - to the brand’s action, because the consumers are “knowingly or unknowingly absorbed into the brand's identity” (Gensler et al. 250). This contribution is made by more or less active consumers participating with different levels of involvement in the brand’s

social identity. Looking at the concept of fan is therefore also essential to explain the

participation of the consumers and how they contribute to this co-production of the brand’s

social identity online.

Going back to the 19th century the word fan was first used - in this meaning - “in journalistic accounts describing followers of professional sports teams (especially in baseball) at a time when the sport moved from a predominantly participant activity to a spectator event”, according to Henry Jenkins (Textual Poachers 12). It is important to note that the term fan was first employed within a sport milieu, as this use is essential in order to grasp the inherent background and context of sports performers and spectators, and of the ensuing production

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11 of content for consumers. To a certain extent, this can be related to the Red Bull brand, which produces and displays sport content online that its consumers interact with.

Introducing the concept of participatory culture in 1992 within the context of television, Jenkins already pinpoints the challenge of fans and brand communication:

[Fan]. A.M. activities pose important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation and circulation of meanings. Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media (23).

More than twenty years later, Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green mention that the production of social identity and the invention of the participatory culture concept was made “to describe the cultural production and social interactions of fan communities, initially seeking a way to differentiate the activities of fans from other forms of spectatorship” (2). This differentiation is crucial online, and especially in the social media environment, because fans “are making their presence felt by actively shaping media flows” (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2). Followers, subscribers, members, likes, shares, comments: the online users definitely constitute social networks.

For Facebook, for example, the platform could not exist without its “1.28 billion daily active

users on average for March 2017.”11_{However on Facebook, not all users can be described}

as fans. Only a user that actively ‘likes’ a specific page becomes a fan of the owner of the page. Going back to the definition of fans which evolved from the core concept of interaction between sports teams and spectators, someone on social media who clicks ‘like’ on the Red Bull page or interacts with the content displayed by the brand can be considered as a Red Bull fan.

Jenkins, Ford and Green through participatory culture consider that the public is no longer composed of people absorbing “preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (2). Thereby fans can be defined as active consumers participating in the co-construction of a brand.

Taking on board the concept of participatory culture, brand managers are no longer single authors of brand production, especially in the social media era, as stated by Adam

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12 Arvidsson, Celia Lury, Peter Cheverton and Sonja Gensler et al. With the advent of social networks, consumers are now able to share previous experiences and visions of the brand, which other consumers trust and relate to. These digital voices have gained such importance through social media that, according to Sonja Gensler et al., “brand managers can no longer afford to ignore” the part consumers play in the public image of a brand (243). This public image of the brand reflects the concept of the brand’s social identity, which is co-produced by both the consumers and the brand itself, and highlights how much brands are co-constructed online.

This co-construction is visible in particular through the content generated by consumers online. This practice is usually referred to as user-generated content (UGC) by scholars and the industry. According to Kaplan and Haenlein, user-generated content “can be seen as the sum of all ways in which people make use of Social Media” (61) and can be “individually or collaboratively produced, modified, shared and consumed” (Smith, Fischer and Yongjian 103). Taking on board this broad definition, the comments, shares and likes of the fans can be understood as user-generated content on the Red Bull brand pages online. As stated by Smith, Fischer and Yongjian, user-generated content “is related to, but not identical with, electronic word-of-mouth” (103). Electronic word of mouth is slightly different from traditional word of mouth (WOM), as it adds the fact that the user’s opinion or statement is publicly available online. According to Godes et al. traditional WOM can be defined “as the one-to-one and face-to-face exchange of information about a product or service” (416). Moreover, WOM gets an even more complex signification in a marketing environment where it is expressed as “the quality that information about one customer’s experiences are possibly influential in another’s decision” (2). This means that consumers have a strong impact on each other when sharing experiences, as mentioned above by Richter, Riemer and vom Brocke, through the concept of viral marketing. According to Clemons, Barnett and Appadurai, “network members tend to trust and rely on each other, and to provide information that other members find useful and reliable” (268). As stated by Pletikosa and Michahelles, social media marketing is therefore adopted by brands in order to use “existing social media platforms for increasing the brand awareness among consumers on online platforms through utilization of the WOM principles” (845). User-generated content as well as electronic word of mouth play an active part in the construction of a brand’s social identity by raising general awareness between consumers online. Interaction between consumers on social networks can carry the brand’s identity towards new individuals and potential new consumers.

Awareness leads, moreover, not only to single participation but generally to networks of

consumers in the opinion of Adam Arvidsson. Because of the interconnection between

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13 communication (…) adding dimensions of value to the brand” (69). The notion of

used-value is essential here in the case of Red Bull. Because brands do not only represent

products, as mentioned by Lury above, but are also part of an image and an identity constructed by many protagonists, a brand can provide consumers with used-value according to Arvidsson. This means that “with a particular brand I can act, feel and be in a particular way” (8). Therefore, by drinking Red Bull, for example, I become something more, constructing as well as feeling part of the social identity of the brand. The effects of

used-value “mediate and cement the social relations that make up the context of consumption”,

in the opinion of Arvidsson (18-19). For this particular reason, “brands thus rely on the productivity of consumers not only for the realization, but for the actual co-production of the values that they promise” (35). The phenomenon of used-value tends to increase consumers’ production of content within what Arvidsson calls networks of interactions. This, according to Pletikosa and Michahelles, generates “many-to-many communication on social media platforms”, increasing exponentially electronic word of mouth (844).

In this context, if brands are regarded as a “medium of exchange” or even a “vehicle of globalization” between consumers, in the terms of Celia Lury, this explains how brands have become an essentially consumer-participative medium more than a company stamp or means of protection. Even though the term brand was created in the nineteenth century to identify, relate and protect a company, “as marks of authenticity in a new world of mass production”, the meaning of brand has

become “a product with a wraparound of emotions and personality” as explained by Peter Cheverton (4). Through their essence, brands became objects of interpretation put into the hands of the consumers. If consumers can “create their own meanings” and are co-constructing the brand, then the brand can also be seen as “blocks” according to Arvidsson (68).

To be more specific, brands are defined as “immaterial, informational objects” (13) in the opinion of Adam Arvidsson, and they can work, in the terms of Celia Lury, as an “abstract machine for the reconfiguration of production” (22). Brands can accordingly be defined as more than simple “blocks”, and rather as an adaptive machine of production “learning how to match the circumstances of time” and desires of consumers (Cheverton 3). To be adaptive and match the society in which they evolve, brands have to be more than a trendy reference in consumers’ minds. This new conception of a brand can “encompass entire lifestyles”, demonstrating to consumers how to ‘live the life’ by using their “emotional charge”, referring to Cheverton (6). This emotional charge, which reaches beyond the conscious desires of consumers, is included in the concept of brand image mentioned above. Brand image can be interpreted as “the range of associations” made in the targets’ minds when a third party evokes the name of the brand (9).

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14 For this reason, even if the brand’s social identity is partly written by consumers online, it requires some core elements from the part of the brand in order to share a common brand

image with the consumers. The lifestyle surrounding the brand’s image in the terms of

Cheverton’s book works as “layers” around the brand product. Moreover, this lifestyle is a carrier of used-value and allows a shared conception of the brand’s image between brands and consumers (6). To communicate this lifestyle, brands attempt to raise awareness online through “a strategy of self-referencing”, as explained by Celia Lury (63). This strategy means that, as maintained by Lury, “when most people are asked for examples of brands they are able to give a list of example” because they are aware of the brands’ existence (66). The aim of this strategy of awareness is for the brand to come at the top of this mental list for the majority of people.

In order to do that, and following Cheverton’s argument, brands have to reach an emotional

charge in the consumers’ minds by combining “brand activity” and “customer interaction.”

This means that the brand actions - in a very broad sense - and the customers’ conception of the brand have to be “pulled together” (16). This requires for brands to have a strong

brand identity but also flexibility. The ability to adapt, grow and change by allowing

customers to interact and take part in the brand’s social identity online is essential for the co-construction of the brand, pulling together the brand and its consumers. Only once brands have reached an emotional charge in the consumers’ minds and are ready to adapt around a solid brand identity, can they then be referred to and furthered on social media platforms. In short, fans can become facilitators of a brand and take part in the social identity of a brand once they share a common brand image.

The emotional charge inserted into the brand’s identity can be seen through the content the brand displays on its various online platforms. Therefore, to engage with consumers, trigger their attention and raise awareness, the content is an essential element to take on board. The aim of looking at the video content is to grasp the impact of extreme sport video content that Red Bull displays online on fans and brand interactions.

Looking at the concept of branded entertainment mentioned above, Kunz, Elsässer and Santomier claim that “sport related branded entertainment can be described as sport content that is co-created by sponsors, sport and media entities, while embedding brands subtlety” (2). In the case of Red Bull’s videos displayed online, the videos are directly produced by the marketing team for the brand, allowing them to insert into almost every video the energy drink product and the brand’s identity or lifestyle as mentioned above. Using essentially sport content across its online platforms, Red Bull’s videos can therefore be considered as sport related branded entertainment. With regard to this definition, Kunz Elsässer and Santomier

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15 explain that the purpose of sport related branded entertainment “is to entertain sport fans and other audiences that voluntarily consume and share the content (…)” (2).

The audience, according by Gantz, W. et al. can be defined as sport fans and can be seen as “those with a particular interest in performers, personalities, and programs, as well as athletes and sports teams” (96). More specifically, by using the term fanship, Gantz et al.

explain that “fanship points to an active and interested audience” (96).Considering this

statement along with Jenkins’ definition of participatory culture mentioned above highlights how sport fans or fanship, according to Gantz et al., “represents an array of thought processes, affective attachments, and behaviors that separate fans from nonfans” (96). Fans, therefore, show a different level of participation and engagement in sport related

branded entertainment.

Moreover, and conforming with Sanchis-Roca’s article, the type of sports posted by the various platforms owned by the Red Bull brand offer “very well selected, quality and free contents where the risk factor, spectacularity and overcoming of limits predominate in an essential manner” (394). Indeed, Red Bull mainly displays sport videos characterized by their extreme sport performances where the aesthetics, the camera views and editing attributes are of prime importance in order to engage with its fans. Sanchis-Roca’s text pinpoints the importance of empowering and entertaining the user through “aesthetical (spectacular and quality images with a clear technological potential)” (395). As a result, extreme sport content is obviously the main part of Red Bull’s social media strategy, adding value to the brand.

Another main characteristic of Red Bull’s online branded entertainment videos is the brand’s use of sport-event related videos. On this subject, the text of Zagnoli and Redicchi provides an interesting approach by analysing and categorizing the dual use of real and virtual events by some companies, “enriching the participation both of practitioners and spectators with multimedia and interactive dimensions” (5). This factor emphasizes the importance of interaction between brands and consumers in relation to events within the online environment. Moreover, this research is very applicable to the Red Bull brand, being “a first attempt to classify experiential sport events staged by industrial companies”, in the words of Zagnoli and Redicchi (27). “Experiential sport events” are here understood as an entertainment experience allowing the company to carry out an “experimentation of industrial products (e.g. clothes, equipment, beverage, pc, etc.)” online (1). This experimental marketing, using different types of sports and events, raises brand awareness and strengthens not only the image of the energy drink, but also reinforces the brand lifestyle in general. The practice used by Red Bull, displaying niche sports within particular events, is thus the core of the brand’s experimental marketing strategy.

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16 According to the articles of Greenhaigh, Greenwell, as well as the one of Miloch and Lambrecht, a niche sport receives limited, if any, attention from the “mainstream” social media, and can therefore be classified as a sport that is not mainstream. According to Rosner and Shropshire’s classification of niche sports, a niche sport is an “emerging sport representing the top level of competition in their sport but not receiving the same level of media coverage or spectatorship as mainstream sports enjoy” (44).

More importantly, their participants and supporters represent a more “homogenous” demographic “sub-segment of sport consumers” than mainstream sports, which allows the brand to reach more accurately-targeted potential consumers, as explained by Miloch and Lambrecht (147). This particular factor is interesting for brand managers, but also for advertisers and sponsors in general, as it allows them to make a selection of interested people, which is indeed an essential element in the era of targeted and personalized advertising.

In the case of Red Bull, a niche sport can also be considered as a sport that combines various practices - such as ice skating and ski-cross for the Red Bull Crashed Ice, for example - and acquires therefore a distinct segment of viewers and participants. Very importantly, creating its own content allows Red Bull to deliver live webcasts of their series of events, and own media rights to them. This means that they can display all over the world without restrictions.

To conclude, the body of this literature review includes the studies relating to the concepts of product placement, branded entertainment, fans, participatory culture, brands, brand image, brand social identity, user-generated content, word of mouth, used-value, experimental marketing and niche sports. This integrative review provides therefore some core concepts necessary for the analysis of how the Red Bull brand engages with its fans through extreme sport video content on social media and on the Red Bull TV website. In addition, awareness of the co-creation of content by both fans and brands online, through those concepts, is necessary to explain and reveal the affordances that the Red Bull social media platforms and Red Bull TV website allow to users. In this context, “an array of online communication tools have arisen to facilitate informal and instantaneous” communication between fans and brands online (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2). In order to examine the Facebook and YouTube social media platforms, as well as the Red Bull TV website, digital tools will be used as mentioned above. This process is explained in detail in the following chapter.

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III. Description of the Method

Red Bull’s brand sphere online

In this section, I will use quantitative and qualitative methods in order to analyse how the Red Bull brand engages with online users through extreme video content on the Red Bull TV website and on social media. Therefore, a cross-platform analysis of the engagement and affordances between brands and users through the use of digital tools looking solely at video content will be undertaken here.

To understand how the Austrian energy drink company is positioned online, I have created a visual overview of the Red Bull brand sphere (see fig. 1). To create a more intelligible overview of the brand sphere, I have placed websites on the left side and social media on the right. This separation will be explained and justified in ‘Findings and discussion’.

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Creation of the visualization

The overview above (see fig. 1) was made with the help of the Mindmeister12_website

developed by the MeisterLabs company. To define the subdivisions and acquire the information about the Red Bull brand sphere given in this overview, I used the Red Bull

Media House website, especially the “Products” section13_{, Google searches as well as the}

search engine within Facebook, YouTube and Instagram platforms. In addition, I used digital

method tools, in particular Netvizz14 and the YouTube Data Tool15 (YTDT) to extract the

number of subscribers from the Red Bull Facebook pages and YouTube channel. The tools and methods I used to collect the data will be explained under the subheading: ‘Fifty

most-engaging videos on social media’.

This visualization (see fig. 1) provides merely an overview of Red Bull’s brand sphere online, and was made to identify the major online platforms of the Red Bull brand displaying essentially video content. However, it is not comprehensive for two main reasons. Firstly, because of the ongoing expansion of the Red Bull brand online, and secondly, because of the extent and complexity of Red Bull’s sponsoring activities and collaboration with other brands.

Data in the visualization

In the Red Bull brand sphere overview (see fig. 1), I have provided a general engagement percentage of the Red Bull YouTube channel as well as the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook pages. This was accomplished by reducing the data to fifty most-engaging videos. This selection will also be explained in detail under the subheading: ‘Fifty most-engaging videos on social media’.

To obtain the engagement percentage (in bright red), the process for both YouTube and Facebook was nearly identical. The engagement percentage of the Red Bull YouTube channel was found by adding the “likeCount”, “dislikeCount” and “commentCount” for each video. Following that, I compared the calculated engagement to the view count to get an engagement percentage on each video (Appendix, figure 5). Finally, I added up the figures to create the general engagement percentage included in the YouTube Red Bull channel in the brand sphere (see fig. 1).

12 https://www.mindmeister.com 13 https://www.redbullmediahouse.com/products-brands/online.html 14 https://apps.facebook.com/netvizz/?ref=br_rs 15 http://labs.polsys.net/tools/youtube/index.php

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19 Concerning the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook percentages, I clicked consecutively on each link in the fifty most-engaging videos to get the number of views for each video directly on Facebook (Appendix, figures 6 and 7). As the engagement was already provided for each video - the sum of reactions, shares and comments - a percentage could be harvested for each video comparing the number of views to the engagement. The last step was to add up all the results to get an average percentage of the two pages, as with the YouTube channel (Appendix, figures 5, 6 and 7).

Object of study

Within this brand sphere, the data was mainly collected on those particular pages of the Red Bull brand concerning social media, in order to focus mainly on video content. The focus will

therefore be on the Red Bull16 and Red Bull TV17 Facebook pages. To be consistent with

this selection, the Red Bull TV website will also be studied. In regards to YouTube, only the

official channel18 will be studied because the Red Bull TV YouTube channel does not exist.

On social media, I decided to focus primarily on Facebook and YouTube, not only because they are the two most visited social media platforms on the Internet, according to the Alexa

software19_, _{but also because they constitute the two leading social networks that drive}

internet traffic to the Red Bull TV website, according to the analytics of SimilarWeb.com (Appendix, figure 4). This means that a lot of the people that look at video content posted by Red Bull on Facebook and YouTube end up on the Red Bull TV website. This emphasizes the need to study those platforms in order to better understand fans and brands interactions online. Both Facebook brand pages and the YouTube channel could be studied with the

help of the digital method tools available on digitalmethods.net20. Those tools allowed me to

collect data about these social media platforms in order to analyse fans’ engagement towards Red Bull’s branded entertainment videos.

Fifty most-engaging videos on social media

In order to see which videos fans engaged with the most on social media, I selected the fifty videos that had the most engagement on the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook pages, as well as the Red Bull YouTube channel. This engagement results from the sum of the reactions (including the Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry options), the comments and 16 https://www.facebook.com/redbull/ 17 https://www.facebook.com/RedBullTV/ 18 https://www.youtube.com/user/redbull 19 http://www.alexa.com/topsites 20 https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiAbout

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20 the shares on Facebook. Concerning YouTube, the engagement is made up of a combination of likes, dislikes and comments.

To be able to extract the data from the Facebook pages and YouTube channel, I used digital methods, as previously mentioned. Digital methods “as a research practice, strive to follow the evolving methods of the medium”, “recombining” the “availability and exploitability of digital objects”, according to Richard Rogers (1). In short, taking social media platforms such as Facebook, “digital methods repurpose or build on top of the dominant devices of the medium, and in doing so make derivative works from the results, figuratively and literally” (3). This means that “the initial outputs may be the same as or similar to those from online devices, but they are seen or rendered in new light” in the opinion of Rogers, turning familiar pages into findings (3). Through the “Digital Methods Initiative”, a project launched by Richard Rogers in “2007 as a research program at the University of Amsterdam” and available on digitalmethods.net a range of tools is thus available to analyse online devices and platforms (7). These digital tools will be explained in detail in the following sections.

YouTube fifty most-engaging videos

Concerning the YouTube data collection, I focused only on the Red Bull YouTube channel, as mentioned above. To analyse this channel, I used the YouTube data Tool available on

digitalmethods.net.21 The outcome of this tool is, according to Bernhard Rieder, “a new set

of scripts, called YouTube Data Tools (YTDT)” allowing the researcher to look at channels through different angles and dissect the data with the help of “five modules that focus on

different sections of the platform.” 22

The very first step was to extract the channel ID that I had inserted into the “YTDT Channel

Info” module, which “retrieves different kinds of information for a channel.” 23_{This gave me}

the creation date as well as the number of subscribers, videos and linked channels listed in the Red Bull brand sphere (see fig. 1).

The second step was to use the “YTDT Video List” modularity to create a list of video and

statistics.24 I inserted the Red Bull YouTube channel id within the search query box and used

the pre-sets: Iterations 1, rank by relevance, set crawl depth 1 and submitted it. I found 6,373 videos when I collected the data on the 20 April 2017, and their statistics (video id, title, comments, views, etc.) After exporting it in a Microsoft Excel file, I decided to reduce the 21 https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/ 22 http://thepoliticsofsystems.net/2015/05/exploring-youtube/ 23 http://labs.polsys.net/tools/youtube/mod_channel_info.php 24 http://labs.polsys.net/tools/youtube/mod_videos_list.php

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21 data to fifty videos with the highest number in the category “engagement”, using the “largest to smallest” filter (Appendix, figure 5).

As explained in the previous section, I then had to add up the comments, likes and shares in order to get the “Total engagement” box. In order to analyse only video content, I filtered the type “category” on “video”, to hide the links, pictures and other possible posts included in the initial data.

Facebook fifty most-engaging videos

In the case of Facebook, I extracted for the Red Bull page on Facebook25 all the videos

between the estimated creation date – first profile picture on the 4 March 2009 - and the 20 April 2017. This data was collected through “a software tool, Netvizz, designed to” perform “data crawling” with the Facebook platform, according to Bernhard Rieder (1). Data crawling, as stated by Wilson, Goslingand Graham, results in “gleaning information about users from their profiles without their active participation” (215). The Netvizz tool allowed me to study users’ interactions with the Facebook platform and especially the Red Bull Facebook pages. Indeed, as explained by Rieder, “the Netvizz application currently extracts data from three different sections of the Facebook platform” - Personal networks, Groups and Pages (4-5). The Pages section was used in this study in order to “identify the posts that produced the highest amount of engagement” (5).

To evaluate the engagement between users and the Red Bull Facebook page, I selected

therefore the page data option on the Netvizz tool available on Facebook.26 Subsequently,

I inserted the Red Bull Facebook page id with the settings “date scope” between 1 March 2009 and 20 April 2017. In order to acquire a broad collection of data, I refined the settings to “post statistic” only and “post by page only”, which gave me an amount of 1,003 posts. This surprisingly low figure suggested that a lot of posts were missing, especially in the year 2016. There were a small number of posts in January and December but nothing in-between. As I was concerned about a possible error on Netvizz due to the broad date range and the amount of data involved, I decided to run consecutively the last 999 posts, the last 500 posts, as well as the posts by date from 01 January 2016 to 01 January 2017. The data was unfortunately still missing.

The data collected on Facebook for this research has therefore to be considered as an incomplete representation of what the Red Bull brand posts online. Also, there is no way (apart from hours of scrolling down) to know if Red Bull deleted the posts or if the Netvizz

25

https://www.facebook.com/redbull/

26

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22 tool could not retrieve the data. Nevertheless, the selection of the fifty most-engaging videos, made the same way as in the YouTube fifty most-engaging videos, minimized the information deficit (Appendix figure 6).

With regard to the Red Bull TV Facebook page27, I collected 1,470 results after applying the

exact same settings in Netvizz used for the analysis of the Red Bull Facebook page. I also reduced the data to the fifty most-engaging videos exactly as I did for the Red Bull YouTube channel (Appendix, figure 7).

The only difference between the two data searches was in estimating the creation date of the page. The Red Bull TV Facebook page shows just one recent profile picture. To resolve this issue, I scrolled down in the video section of the page until the 20 July 2015, which was the first video posting on the page. The date scope of the Red Bull TV Facebook page selected in this study is therefore between the 20 July 2015 and 20 April 2017.

Website Affordances

After gathering the fifty most-engaging videos for the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook pages as well as the official YouTube channel, which will constitute the core of the social media sources for this thesis, I also analysed the Red Bull TV website. I decided to select the Red Bull TV website for two main reasons, beside the fact of its simple accordance with social media. Firstly, because the content displayed on Red Bull TV is essentially made up of “extreme” video content, taking the “audiences up close and behind the scenes to reveal

the real-life stories of a diverse range of people”28, according to the Red Bull media house’s

description of Red Bull TV. Secondly, because of the fact that Red Bull TV has live streams and browsed channel options refined into applications for television, computers, game consoles or smartphones. These two elements provide an interesting interface between brands and consumers, enabling diverse online interactions.

A study of the Red Bull TV website will result in a separation of the findings and discussion chapter into a website section and the social media brand aforementioned pages, entitled therefore ‘Parts 1 and 2’. This separation is necessary because the users’ engagement on the Red Bull TV website cannot be measured and therefore has to be studied in terms of

affordances. In other words, what the website affords users to do.

The concept of affordances - first defined by Gibson as “something that refers to both the environment and the animal” (126) - is interesting when considered through Donald

27

https://www.facebook.com/RedBullTV/

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23 Norman’s definition. According to Bucher and Helmond, Norman’s “aim was to explore the relationship between human cognition and the design of devices and everyday things” (5). Certain technological objects can in fact “encourage or constrain specific actions” (6). The online user can thus be mentally stimulated or limited depending on what a website affords him to do. The term of affordances is therefore crucial to understand and analyse websites and users’ interactions.

Part I: Interface Analysis of the Red Bull TV website

This first part will therefore consider the Red Bull TV website as a possible space for interaction between fans and brands. I looked at the affordances and the possibilities of interactions between the video content displayed on the platform by the brand and its viewers. This will be made by dividing the Red Bull TV website analysis into two steps. The first step consists of an analysis of the Red Bull TV website through its interface in order to understand the impact of the interactions between users and the website. Johanna Drucker defines the term interface as the space between “rational organization of content and the need to balance this with an intuitive way of using that content” (10). This arrangement of the content made by the brand can be analysed by comparing the website’s

design from its creation date until today, using the Wayback Machine29_{tool. According to}

Rogers, “one can study the evolution of a single page (or multiple pages) over time, for example by collecting snapshots from the dates that a page has been indexed” (66). Therefore, I screen-shot a snapshot a year to get a general overview of the development of the website. In this way, “the evolution” of a specific web page can be studied over time, according to Rogers (66).

This internet archive tool was developed in California in 1996 and allows us to retrieve

internet pages and analyse their history.30 According to the website description, “the Internet

Archive Wayback Machine supports a number of different APIs to make it easier for

developers to retrieve information about Wayback capture data.”31 As with the Netvizz and

YouTube Data Tool previously mentioned, the Wayback Machine uses API (application programming interfaces). This means, according to Rieder, that:

“Access through sanctioned APIs makes use of the machine interfaces provided by many Web 2.0 services to third-party developers with the objective of stimulating application

29 http://archive.org/web/ 30 https://archive.org/about/ 31 https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php

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24 development and integration with other services in order to provide additional functionality and utility to users” (347).

The usefulness of API for users can be explained because it “provides well-structured data”, in the opinion of Rieder (347). Accordingly, a historical interface analysis of the Red Bull TV website through the concept of affordances will be undertaken here. Looking at what the website allows users to do in terms of interactions over time, opens the discussion on how fans can interact with the Red Bull content on the website.

Building on this first study, the second step of this section will focus on what the website allows the brand to do in terms of video content. As Red Bull TV is a digital video service platform, this enables the brand to provide different and varied video content on social media platforms to engage with its consumers.

According to Bucher and Helmond, a grasp of the term affordances is crucial for understanding and analysing websites, as well as “social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users” (3). By looking at Red Bull TV’s website affordances, and also fans’ engagement through video content, I will be able to answer the question: how the Red Bull brand engage with its fans through extreme sport video content on social media and on the Red Bull TV website?

Part II: Social Media Analysis

I will therefore analyse in detail the engagement of fans with the Red Bull video content on social media. This section will be based on the data from the fifty most-engaging videos, as mentioned above. It will be divided into five main subheadings in order to deconstruct fans’ engagement with video content displayed by Red Bull, as well as Red Bull’s strategy to engage with its fans.

Emotional charge

First of all, to understand how Red Bull produces videos filled with emotional charge, in the words of Cheverton, in order to engage with its fans, I will provide specific examples of the captions provided by the brand in the fifty most-engaging videos posted online. In addition to that, I will look at the content itself and what is displayed, in order to understand the fans’ engagement with specific types of videos displayed by the brand.

Segmentation

Moreover, the language, location and time attributes of the videos will help to understand who the videos are intended for. Indeed, as Red Bull organizes niche sports events all over the world and sponsors athletes from around 67 different countries, it is common to see

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25 posts in a language specifically intended for a particular audience (Appendix, figure 2). This will aim to reveal the impact on consumers’ engagement according to that targeted type of content.

With regard to this, the Netvizz “fans per country” file was used to see where the Red Bull and Red Bull TV pages “fans” came from (Appendix, Figure 9). I also used the Netvizz data from the fifty most-engaging videos. The “post statistic only and post by page only” settings allowed me to collect a ‘fans per country’ file. By using the date ranges used in the Facebook fifty most-engaging videos I could put the fans per country of both pages in an Excel file (Appendix, figure 9). Also, I removed the two-letter country abbreviations used by Netvizz and replaced them with the complete country names to make the document easier to read. For YouTube, the YTDT tool unfortunately did not provide the background of the subscribers. For this reason, I had to exclude the YouTube social media platform from this part of my analysis.

Electronic WOM

Thirdly, based on Jenkins participatory culture concept, the importance of user-generated

content, and the concept of electronic word of mouth, I will undertake a qualitative analysis

of the comments provided in the fifty most-engaging videos through the different social media aforementioned pages. This will reveal the fans’ co-construction of the Red Bull brand’s social identity. Within the comments, it is also necessary to look at the tags by consumers, mentioning each others’ names, and generating awareness and electronic word of mouth.

Brand Networks

Fourthly, to complement this approach, it is essential to look at and compare how brands constitute a network on different channels. In short, how they position themselves online. Indeed, investigating the interaction and positioning of a brand towards its fans is necessary to analyse the brand’s networks, and the ‘like’ networks themselves. This will allow us to see if the Red Bull, Red Bull TV Facebook pages, and the YouTube channel have a tendency to follow specific kinds of pages or other channels. This aspect will be further explained in the ‘Findings and discussion’ section using the concept of networks of interactions by Arvidsson, mentioned in the literature review chapter.

For this section, the Gephi32 tool is used to produce network visualizations. Gephi is defined

by Bastian, Heymann and Jacomy as “an open source network exploration and manipulation

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26 software. Developed modules can import, visualize, spatialize, filter, manipulate and export all types of networks” (1). Using data from Netvizz in the form of gdf files can after that be opened in the Gephi software in order to visualize the networks.

Facebook ‘like’ network.

To produce the ‘like’ network of the Red Bull TV Facebook page (see fig. 14),the data was

first extracted from Netvizz with the page id using the parameters: “page like network” and “depth1”. Opening the file in the Gephi network analysis software, I first used the layout “ForceAtlas 2” to run the network. The second step was to apply the layout “label adjust” to avoid text overlapping and make the key readable. After that, the tool modularity class was used on the node’s colour to show the interconnections of the different network groups of followers of the Red Bull TV Facebook page. The different colours are broadly illustrating subcategories of highly interconnected pages in terms of fans. The attribute “fan_count” was consequently applied to the size of the nodes and was key to giving a large overview of the number of fans ‘liking’ the various pages and people.

To create the visualization of the Red Bull page ‘like’ network (see fig. 15),I used exactly

the same process utilizing Netvizz and Gephi, as well as the same settings as for the Red Bull TV Facebook page graph. I only introduced a red circle in order to identify the Red Bull TV node on the Red Bull page ‘like’ network graph.

YouTube linked channels and videos

To look at the network of the Red Bull channel on YouTube, I ran the “YTDT Channel

Network” 33 tool using the channel id and the settings “Iterations 1”, “set crawl depth 1.” This

gave me 23 featured channels. A featured channel, unlike a recommended channel, is not based on the YouTube user viewing history but on a selection made specifically by the channel owner.

To be able to feature a channel, the owner must first turn on the option “customise the layout of your channel” in the channel settings on YouTube. To be sure that the YTDT Channel Network was only looking at featured channels and not subscriptions, I tried with my own YouTube channel after featuring the Red Bull and Vans channels but subscribing to a lot of others. After using the same settings in the YTDT Channel Network, the gdf file showed only the channels I featured and not the ones I subscribed to.

Clicking on the “channel” section of the official Red Bull YouTube channel34, the user can

only see the channels which Red Bull is subscribed too. I counted 91 of them, which

33

http://labs.polsys.net/tools/youtube/mod_channels_net.php

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27 illustrates again that the YTDT Channel Network tool only extracted the featured channels of Red Bull on YouTube.

After this clarification, I opened the Red Bull channel gdf file in Gephi. Similar to the Facebook ‘like’ network, I ran consecutively “ForceAtlas 2”, “label adjust” and the “modularity class” tool. The attribute “subscribercount” was also applied here to the size of the nodes (see fig. 13).

Cross-platform comparison

Fifthly, in addition to the brand network positioning, I made a comparison of the types of sport displayed on both the Red Bull and the Red Bull TV Facebook pages, and the YouTube channel, and I looked at which sports consumers engaged with the most. By selecting the ten most-engaging videos on each fifty most-engaging file, I was able to perform a cross-platform analysis. This evaluation was performed in order to discern if fans engage differently with branded video content depending on its attributes or on which platform it is displayed. I kept therefore the initial engagement filter instead of my personal engagement percentage for selecting the ten most-engaging videos (Appendix, figure 8).

In order to create this comparison, the official Red Bull35 website was used to extract the

information concerning the sponsored athletes and the different sport categories. The first step was to click on the “Athlete” section and “more athletes”, and then I selected all the countries in the scroll down and copy-pasted them in a Microsoft Excel file (Appendix, figure 2). I did exactly the same under the “all disciplines” section to extract the type of sports the sponsored athletes were performing.

Using the “category” column included in the “Athletes” section, I could extract a list of sports that Red Bull’s sponsored athletes perform. From this, I took the ten videos with the highest engagement rate on the files fifty most-engaging videos. By simply filling in red the boxes where the sport was shown, I was able to ascertain which sports viewers engage most with online (Appendix, figure 8). To complete the graph for the qualitative analysis, I also included the caption, the video id, the tags made by Red Bull, and the engagement percentage calculated in the fifty most-engaging videos files.

In this qualitative analysis, the process involved clicking on each video of the fifty

most-engaging videos to analyse the differences of engagement within the same page or channel.

By analysing consecutively the Red Bull, Red Bull TV and Red Bull YouTube channel top fifty videos, a comparison could be made within the same page. This process was performed

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28 in order to reveal some engagement patterns depending on the type of content, attributes and platforms on which the videos are posted by the brand, in order to analyse how the Red Bull brand engages with its fans through extreme sport video content (Appendix, figure 8).

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IV. Findings and Discussion

In the following part, the findings will be discussed with the help of the concepts presented in the literature review. This chapter will be divided into two distinct sections. First, an interface analysis of the Red Bull TV website through the concept of affordances will be undertaken to show how the brand affords users to interact with the video content on the website. This approach also clarifies how the website features allows the brand to communicate with its consumers. In the second part, the Red Bull and Red Bull TV Facebook pages as well as the Red Bull YouTube channel will be studied to understand how online interactions leads to a co-construction of the brand’s social identity online. Finally, this correlation of engagement and content provided by both fans and brands will attempt to answer the question, how does the Red Bull brand engage with its fans through video content online?

Mapping out the Red Bull brand sphere elucidated how the brand spreads out online in order to engage with consumers (see fig. 1). The combination of websites and social media allowed me to effectively characterize the two main components of the Red Bull brand online. A website section on the left, in which I included the television products of Red Bull, and a social media section on the right. The others categories; the Facilities, Red Bull Sports teams, Printed Advertising, Music and Apps, were built around it. This emphasizes how, according to Kunz, Elsässer and Santomier “Red Bull produces multiple media formats related to sport (texts, pictures, audios, broadcasts, videos, films) in order to distribute them across its own and others’ media platforms (print products, TV stations, video and films, games, mobile apps, as well as various Internet services) to reach consumers” (10).

Accordingly, and from Adam Arvidsson’s opinion, “the new possibilities for synergies and cross marketing provided by the emerging internet environment were actively utilized to multiply the channels available to marketing. Marketing thus took an increasingly multidimensional turn in the 1990s” (68). Since then, the rapid transformation of the media environment, “enable a more far-reaching subsumption of the productivity of consumers” (75). This means that the increasing use of cross-media branding allowed brands to encompass consumer productivity more broadly online.

Focusing on two brand spaces, the Red Bull TV website, and social media, will help to analyse in greater detail the possibilities of interactions between fans and brands. This includes Red Bull’s various possibilities to engage with its fans as well as fans participation through extreme sport video content.

Red Bull Brand Dissemination