How Red Bull Found Its Social Wings

Over the course of the last five years, Red Bull managed to increase the Earned Media Value of its social marketing campaigns from $50 million to over $300 million, beating out competitors like Coca-Cola, Gatorade and others in the non-alcoholic beverage category, according to CreatorIQ.

It achieved this by creating content with partners aligned with its testosterone-driven target audience — think Formula 1, competitive eSports, World Surf League. Interestingly, it also focused less on influencer-heavy platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and more on YouTube and Facebook: 

• YouTube accounted for six of Red Bull’s top 10 EMV-driving pieces of content, while Facebook chipped in the other four.
• Expanded to the top 20 posts, it’s 12 for YouTube, seven for Facebook. TikTok is the outlier with a single post.

The correlation between content volume and EMV is strong. The first chart below shows the increase in Red Bull’s content volume from 2018 - 2023. The second shows the company’s rise in EMV over the same timeframe. Coincidence?