Baby goats will soon replace humans as the vehicle for action sports branding.
I’m sure that by now you’ve seen the “baby goat playing on giant pig” video, and hopefully the Action Sports Division has had some time to absorb the implications vis--vis our athlete branding strategy going forward. Despite all the money we’ve thrown into enthralling the beverage-consuming public with stupid human tricks performed by bros in flat-brimmed hats, we’re getting crushed in the ratings by adorable animal videos on YouTube. As I write this, the baby goat’s Q-rating and Likability Index has surged past NBA MVP LeBron James and is now rivaling breasts and illegal drugs. In fact, when we recently polled the public, well over 60 percent said that not only did they prefer baby goats to people jumping snowmobiles out of helicopters, but they also admitted that if they did watch a Red Bull event it was only in the hope that there would be some kind of fiery conflagration that would immolate everyone involved.
We may have dropped an Austrian man out of a balloon and built some sick BMX jumps, but the goat has serious momentum. Enough that we have been forced to reconsider our entire Action Sports branding effort. We have sent people hurtling through the air in every conceivable fashion, attached to every possible device, flipping and spinning along every axis. But America isn’t buying it anymore; we need to stay two steps ahead of the competition, and right now that means baby goats jumping on pigs.
Obviously, this goat could be the next Shaun White and we should sign him right away. The ceiling is virtually unlimited:
– We could get the world’s biggest pig for him to jump on, or see if he’ll jump on other things, more exciting shit like the Tokyo Bullet Train, the world’s biggest hip jump, or Kristi Leskinen.
– We could even invite the world’s most nimble and frolicsome baby goats to some kind of jam-format invitational session on a really progressively-shaped pig.
– Or even a wild boar. We could call it the Redbull Ultimate GoatThrill: Boar Session. F–k it, we could toss the goat out of a space balloon and see if it can break the speed of sound.
– Then we drop the behind the scenes footage with the goat looking moodily off into the distance and talking about how it’s all about just jumping on a pig with your goat bros and it’s all a calculated risk, while wearing a Red Bull hat. Lifestyle shots of him during a regular day, just being a baby goat, but still 100 percent focused on progressing the sport.
You know the drill.
But we need to think bigger than just one remarkably progressive goat, or even what we’ve decided to call FreeGoating as a whole. If the content market is going animals, we need to treat it the same way we treat Formula One racing, Bungee Jumping, or being douchebags: total domination.
While Monster and Mountain Dew search the world for talented baby goats or sloths, we will be breeding little animal Lance Armstrongs in a top-secret mountain-top laboratory. Monkeys that skateboard. Freestyle boa constrictors. Super cute kittens. If the public wants videos of animals doing wacky-ass shit, we’ll give them the sickest videos of the gnarliest animals doing the ultimate in wacky-ass shit, Red Bull Style.
And although you may have heard some rumors of a secret project to create mythical beasts such as the manticore or sea serpent, I can assure you that Red Bull has no intention of using laser beams and gene-splicing techniques to do any such thing, or of using our new Animal Athlete Development Facility to breed a race of evil robot apes to take over the world.
Thus, to circle back, at the end of the day our action sports branding strategy remains the same, but henceforth we’ll being dropping all athletes and human sports programs and replacing them with animals we make in a test tube, for a net savings of over one billion dollars (in other words, your jobs). So thank you for being on Team Red Bull, and again, no need to worry about robot apes taking over the world. If we did breed a race of evil robot apes, they would only be used for peaceful purposes. In the meantime, security will assist you in cleaning out your desks and provide a helpful escort out of the building.
All hail Red Bull!
Jacque LaRue, Manager FreeGoating and Robot Ape Invasion/ Giant Kraken Dept.
Red Bull Intl.
The post To: All Employees, Red Bull Action Sports Division appeared first on POWDER Magazine.