Red Bull’s Tahitian wave shoot

Web marketers and developers talk glibly about offering site visitors an “immersive” experience. Quite often, that simply means being able to see all four sides of a running shoe.

But when the creators of a new site from energy drink Red Bull talk about immersion, they’re speaking pretty darn close to literally—as in, being able to look up and see 20-foot Pacific waves curling over your head.

The site, www.RedBullSurfing.com, was built to showcase some astounding wave-riding content compiled with the help of Red Bull’s sponsored championship surfer team and a breakthrough video camera tech that produces 360-degree motion pictures. While the Flash clips are streaming, viewers can control the camera angles with their PC keyboards to look to the left or right, ahead or behind, and—most popular with the hang-ten crowd—up.

The footage was taken last November and debuted when Red Bull launched the Web site in March. To get it, surfers wore the 25-pound cameras from Immersive Technology strapped to their backs while they rode the waves in Teahpoo, Tahiti for five days last November. Teahpoo is known for the size of its curls, which can rise to 30 feet and break in just a few feet of water on the reef. And giant tube-shaped waves mean lots of opportunities to get into ‘the barrel’, that open space between the water’s surface and the wave’s curl that make it look like a surfer is riding inside the wave.

“Riding in the barrel at Teahpoo is an experience that only a handful of the best surfers in the world will ever be able to have,” says Butch Bannon, director of special projects and business development for TAOW, the Seattle-based creative agency for Red Bull on this project. “If you’re a surfer, to be able to actually look around while in the barrel is pretty remarkable.”

The form fits the content, too, in that visitors can basically “direct” the movies for themselves. “We wanted to take you to a place that you normally wouldn’t go and then give you a perspective that’s totally yours,” says Bannon. “Nobody’s telling you where to look. You’re in control; you’re the director of your own experience with this content.”

“Red Bull has always been about action sports and free sports,” says Josh Kendrick, athletic marketing manager for the company. “We were exposed to this 360-degree technology and developed some basic ideas about how to troubleshoot it and waterproof it. We started testing it with less critical surf but then went straight to the other end of the spectrum. Teahpoo is considered the craziest, heaviest waves in the world, and the surfers were just getting tubed by the waves. In skiing, powder always reigns supreme; and the barrel is the same thing in surfing.”

The site also offers general news about the Red Bull surfing team, a photo gallery and individual blogs from the team members. The videos can be embedded in users’ blog sites for viral spread.

While it serves to raise Red Bull’s profile among the hard-core surfing community, both Bannon and Kendrick say the combination of dramatic video and buzzworthy technology should make even the most landlocked visitor stay with the site longer and come back more than once.

“We went to Tahiti and started filming, and we did a quick ‘rough stitch’, so the image wasn’t perfect yet,” says Bannon. “But I saw some of the best surfers on the planet looking at these roughs, and they spent 15 or 20 minutes looking over and over again at a wave that lasted 15 or 30 seconds in time. That’s pretty remarkable from just a content perspective. What 15-second video have you ever watched for 20 minutes?”

TAOW began in business primarily by running experiential promotions for brands, and over its four-year existence has become something of a specialist in integrating those real-life experiences with other elements of a marketing campaign. The agency first used Immersive’s camera-in-the-round to film parts of Adidas’ “Basketball Is a Brotherhood” campaign that launched on the Web last October.

“We have a real experience in connecting core users to brands in a non-traditional way,” Bannon says. “With the Immersive camera platform, you give someone that first-person perspective. Now you’re not only watching Kevin Garnett and Tracy Grady on the basketball court, you’re essentially there and watching what you want to look at. For us, having the ability to activate an athlete in that way and then have the back-end metrics to see how people spent their time is invaluable.”