Airdrop
- Brand
- Red Bull
- Year
- 2018
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Racing & Sports
- Platform
- Social
- Agency
- EPIC Agency
Objective
Red Bull built Airdrop to carry its global ORGANICS launch beyond the physical stunt of dropping custom crates of cans on university campuses, giving the campaign a digital layer that could reach students wherever they already spent time online. By putting the game inside Facebook and Messenger, the brand kept talking to that campus audience well past the one-off drop events, using leaderboards, a chat bot and social sharing to pull players back throughout the launch.
Solution
A player taps the game open straight from a Facebook or Messenger chat — no app download, no store. They pilot a hot-air balloon on a never-ending flight over low-poly recreations of real cities like Cairo and New York, steering side to side to scoop up ORGANICS cans and dodge obstacles along the way. At marked zones below, they release their collected cans to score points, then keep flying until a crash ends the run. Every finished run drops the player onto a friends-only leaderboard that shows exactly who to beat next, and they can share the result or challenge a friend directly back into the same conversation. Between sessions, the campaign's Messenger bot sends them personal messages and rewards to draw them back for another flight.
- 1
The player finds the game inside a Facebook Messenger thread called "Airdrop Game" and opens it with a tap, with no download or install.
- 2
The game hands over control within seconds: the player pilots a Red Bull Organics-branded hot-air balloon over an endless, low-poly landscape, steering it by dragging a finger across the screen to shift height and position.
- 3
The core loop is collecting Organics cans scattered through the sky, which stack up in the balloon's basket, while dodging meteors that end the run on contact and flying through fog clouds that obscure the screen until they clear on their own or the player swipes them away.
- 4
The player steers the balloon into marked drop zones and releases the collected cans, scoring points for each successful drop.
- 5
Bonuses and special mechanics appear during the run and alter the flight as the player encounters them.
- 6
The longer the flight lasts, the farther it travels: the landscape below shifts through recognizable low-poly renditions of world cities such as Cairo and New York, with the sky continuing indefinitely.
- 7
Score and other stats stay visible in a HUD overlaid on the flight without interrupting play.
- 8
Runs feed a leaderboard of Facebook friends, with the interface pointing out the next friend to beat.
- 9
Players can view achievements, send friends bonuses and gifts, and share their result or issue a challenge, all through built-in Facebook sharing.
- 10
After a session ends, the player keeps receiving Messenger messages from the Airdrop chatbot with personalized campaign updates and rewards that draw them back into the game.
