Red Bull Master Maze
The perfect example of what we can achieve if our capabilities work together in synergy
Client
- Red Bull
Office
- Hungary
Red Bull’s digital branding strategy revolves around consumer activations, on-premise- and off-premise consumption activations. These gamified and interactive engagements are often similar in nature and it is becoming increasingly difficult for the brand to deliver new own mechanics and concept ideas. Our agency was invited early in the RFI stage to deliver new game concepts in support of revealing Red Bull’s new Winter Edition flavour. The catch was if we won the concept race, we’d get to deliver the solution.
The team was inspired in multiple ways. Being a cross-capability project team across CX, Marcom, Technology and Delivery, research and validation work could go hand-in-hand and allowed for quick ideation rounds and iterations. On a concept level, the team was inspired by various mini-game concepts which focused on playing around with colours, mixing liquids and flavours, timed reaction based solutions and even AR.
The main direction was quickly backed up by Red Bull. The governing idea for the chosen concept was in favour of a new control scheme, which allows for a future proof game platform which can be further developed, improved (with gyroscope) or maybe ported to entirely new use cases. On top of it, via colour scheming, the engagement could be re-used for entirely different disciplines or future flavour and special edition reveals. We settled on a maze-game with a physics engine for moving a ball around a labyrinth canvas, which once is completed by the end-user, is going to reveal the new edition to the players.
Following delivery in 2023 early Q4, the engagement saw a big popularity among the markets, as it is rare to see a consumer activation as quickly adopted in its first year of release as this. It has already seen 5+ market rollouts and it is expected to be on the rise for 2024. There are already product improvements lined up for the platform and it is expected to see its first mutation in cooperation with Red Bull and another 3rd party agency. In April 2024, the German market is looking forward to bringing the game into the real world by projecting the game canvas onto the floor, which then would be possible to play via step and other ground touch controls by brave players live. This solution is expected to have an interactive Twitch element to it, as well as being cast live on the same platform.