Marketing high for Red Bull

TELEPRINTER:HOW MUCH WAS Felix Baumgartner's 120,000 foot "space jump" worth to Red Bull, the brand that sponsored it?

"Tens of millions of dollars" suggested Ben Sturner, chief executive of sports marketing firm the Leverage Agency by way of Forbes.com, while an unnamed advertising insider gave the Daily Telegraph a slightly more generous guesstimate of £100 million.

The supersonic skydive, officially known as Red Bull Stratos, pulled in eight million live viewers to YouTube – its biggest live-streamed event to date – while a long-planned documentary co-produced by the BBC and National Geographic will air next month.

Red Bull plays big to win big – the UK arm of the company spent £48 million on marketing in Britain and Ireland last year, a spend that equates to about 20 per cent of its turnover.

A more interesting, if morbidly hypothetical question, is how much damage would there have been to Red Bull’s brand if it had turned out that the drink hadn’t given Baumgartner wings after all.