Red Bull Music Events
Red Bull were looking to deepen their connection to subcultures in Japan, with music and culture playing a key role in their consumer engagement strategy.
Our team had been the partner for their music strategy since the inaugural Japan edition of the Red Bull Music Festival in 2017.
Red Bull had made significant strides in achieving their goal of ‘moving music culture forward’, with events that spanned mainstream artists with mass appeal, underground talent, and up-and-coming future stars.
While these were a useful series of events, we had yet to codify an approach for long-term, data-driven strategic planning.
We proposed a new model to optimise Red Bull’s investments in music and culture, identifying quantifiable audience behaviours that map to emerging trends in these continually shifting spaces.
This meant that we could influence and build consensus on investments with Red Bull Japan and global teams, rather than relying on the biases and cultural tastes of individual stakeholders.
We were able to answer questions around:
This data-driven strategy allowed us to improve decision making across the Red Bull partnership, making targeted decisions around artist selection, music programming, and event ideation.
This culminated in unique Red Bull content being developed with emerging artists, with “machìna” being the first story identified through this model.
Traversing the quiet fields of rural South Korea, through to the city lights of central Tokyo, “machìna” charts the story of a former K-Pop idol who turns her back on the rigours of the mainstream music industry to pursue passions as an independent artist.
This 12-minute documentary eschews a linear narrative in favour of an ethereal profile of Yeohee Kim, telling the story of the places and experiences that can be heard in her music.
