Chronicle - High Advertising, Really High
With such high-profile events funded by corporate money, there are always divided opinions. Particularly in the watch industry, where companies often vying for the attention of the public sometimes invest in the trivial and meaningless.
Felix Baumgartner's daredevil skydive from the stratosphere can be categorized neither as a stunt nor as trivial. NASA publicly congratulated him on Twitter; every major and minor news outlet in the world reported on the event; and - I don't know about you - but pretty much everyone I know either watched it or was at least aware of it.
In fact, I would personally say that Baumgartner's leap of personal faith was an important event that connected the globe for a short few hours of a given Sunday, leaving people of all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds and religions breathless. It was a unifying experience, drawing more than eight million youtube viewers, the largest single event ever broadcast on the web.
With his skydive from a height more than four times at that which the conventional passenger airplane flies, Baumgartner stopped the world from turning for just a short while, almost as if he had taken all of humanity with him to the edge of space, listening in to his hypnotic breathing within the helmet.
And he wore a Zenith
If you were in any way affiliated with the watch industry, you certainly couldn't help but be proud to notice the large Zenith logo emblazoned across both the capsule and Baumgartner's spacesuit. In fact, when I looked at it, my heart swelled a bit knowing that the Le Locle-based watch brand had invested in this heart-stopping, experiential event destined to attract the world's attention.
Dave Thier, a contributor at Forbes.com, said, "It's a real, tangible thing that's exciting in a way that an advertisement could never be." And, in my opinion, Thier has hit the nail right on the head with that statement. Associating Zenith with Baumgartner's Red Bull Stratos mission was nothing short of a stroke of genius.
"This is truly a leap into the unknown. No one can predict how the human body will respond when it crosses the sound barrier in a near-space environment," Baumgartner said many months before his historic jump. By breaking the sound barrier with his body, this man proved that both humanity and the wristwatch are capable of incredible, death-defying feats.
But more than that, he proved that a watch company can make really good advertising and marketing decisions. Just ask CEO Jean-Frederic Dufour, who is probably still doing the happy dance as we speak…