What would you do to own a small piece of history? If you’re an Oracle Red Bull Racing fan, you’d jump at the chance faster than a Formula One pit crew slinging tires.
Earlier in this F1 season, Oracle Red Bull Racing offered fans something special: a free piece of Max Verstappen’s replica race suit from his championship 2021 season. Within 24 hours, 30,000 fans grabbed the opportunity. Through The Paddock, the team’s loyalty and rewards platform, they claimed every piece of the suit.
An easy way to gather fan-created video
Fans received their mementos, roughly one square inch in size, in a custom display box, which included a card asking them to capture their excitement by making an unboxing video. Using a QR code, they uploaded their recordings via Oracle Sauce Video, a collaborative video-creation platform within Oracle Content Management, that makes it easy to crowdsource video. Oracle Red Bull Racing will draw from hundreds of submissions to produce a campaign compilation video, “Your Piece of History,” showing fan reactions to receiving this unique gift. The team will distribute the video on its social media channels.
“The videos we get through Sauce, which are part of our broader efforts to activate fan engagement, are important because we want our fans to feel closer to the team,” says Jayvik Patel, digital experience manager, Oracle Red Bull Racing. “They get to be part of the story, and we’re able to collect amazing videos from all over the world.”
It now takes only minutes for Patel’s team to create campaigns in Sauce Video, where they can design their video brief and craft a shot list that guides their fans on what videos to shoot.
It’s also simple for the team’s mobile-first fans, who can upload, title, and submit their videos with a just a few taps.
The team used Sauce Video again in the run-up to the Miami Grand Prix in May. Fans could win a driver-autographed T-shirt by uploading videos of themselves making a Red Bull Twist—Red Bull Original or Sugar Free with soda water, ice, fresh mint, lime wedges, and apple slices. Fans were encouraged to give it a twist with their own favorite ingredients.
“We were asking more from fans by encouraging them to create a drink and send us a video,” Patel says. “The quality of the videos was wonderful. It showed how creative and loyal our fans are, and how much they want to be involved.” Plans are underway to launch additional campaigns tied to this year’s remaining races.
What lessons has Oracle Red Bull Racing learned from these first two video campaigns? “You need to define the end product you want to get—whether it’s a compilation video or something else—and work backwards,” Patel says. “That helps to build the campaign and communicate with fans.”
A better way to manage professional videos
Oracle Red Bull Racing runs Oracle Content Management and Sauce Video on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), giving the team one-stop shopping for video creation. The team has been using OCI for a growing number of tasks ever since Red Bull Racing and Oracle announced their partnership in 2021.
While Sauce Video works great for user-generated videos, Oracle Red Bull Racing moved its massive library of professionally shot race footage to Oracle Content Management, where it’s stored, tagged, and retrieved for use in marketing activities. The secure, cloud-based content management system centralizes digital content, giving Oracle Red Bull Racing speedier access to content, such as video, while making it easier to create, syndicate, and distribute content through digital channels.
Oracle Red Bull Racing’s videos live on Oracle Content Management as stored objects. AI-driven smart tags accelerate search and retrieval, using integrated image recognition and natural language processing to understand and recommend the most relevant images and content. If, for example, Oracle Red Bull Racing wants to create videos of its racing team at the Italian Grand Prix, they can pull footage from the cloud, carve out the best action, tag it, and have it ready to use in marketing assets.
In a video-hungry world, speedy production helps the team win with fans. “We’re trying to build a community of global fans that want to support the team,” Patel says. “Even if they’re 7,000 miles away, we want them to feel like they’re part of us. Which indeed, they are.”