Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
Really interesting you talk about this - been watching a documentary series about Rich Paul (LeBron's agent, friend and business partner) and he's absolutely brutally honest with new NBA players, telling them they've got until 33, so make as much money as possible, invest wisely etc. Only Martin Whiteley I can think of offering that kind of holistic service in "our" world.
Adding onto your point:
From a value to (outside) brand, sponsoring a world tour team makes sense. Even if just looking at the big 3 races, Tour, Giro, and the Vuelta, the amount of major TV airtime they get, is likely a far greater ROI (visibility) than sponsoring an MTB team. To an extent, the cost of sponsoring an MTB with limited ask and limited return is just far less interesting to a marketing firm/agency/division than a bigger ask with a bigger return. Right or wrong, they potentially just don't care about targeting smaller markets.
(Just to add to this, and I could be overlapping.)
I mean you also have to look at it from a marketing perspective. Not only are RB, Monster, RS, etc. energy drinks, but they are also in events and media. Think of all the video parts that you watch, the Red Bull streaming service, Red Bull Media House, Rampage and all the other huge events they put on. Same thing with Monster, you have the Monster Energy Supercross series, the new DH series, etc. Would these companies still survive if the only thing they did were sponsoring athletes, events, media, and dropped selling energy drinks? Possibly. Maybe it's just different times, but I don't think cigarette companies would've have expanded into these types of things today. I mean to be fair, Marlboro and other cigarette brands don't really have a form of media production. Same thing with beer and other alcohol companies. Mostly because they spend money on commercials rather than sponsoring events, or video projects, although I could be wrong about this. Would beer companies survive if they dropped selling beer and instead focused on events and different forms of media production? Probably not.
Long story short, the point I'm trying to make is that those energy drink brands are more than just selling an energy drink in hindsight.
A quick Google indicates that Red Bull sold 12 billion cans in 2023. Monster did just shy of $7B in sales for the year ending Q3 2023. I'm thinking that drinks really are their core business, and that they would not survive without them. The marketing is stuff like SX, DH, Rampage, etc.
Exactly. All you need to do is work out paid media value (i.e. cost of buying same number of ad impressions - whether TV, digital display, print etc) to get the same guaranteed number of eyeballs as event/athlete branding, and you'll see that it's far, far cheaper to do it the way RB/Monster do.
And now Red Bull have bought into the Bora-Hansgrohe road team......
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