Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner performed an epic space jump on October 14, 2012, by ascending over 24 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, in a stratospheric balloon. He set several world records that day, and the event also was a patient and canny marketing stunt for both Red Bull (which spent millions of dollars and backed him for seven years) and now GoPro, whose cameras he used to film his remarkable (and terrifying) descent.
This video contains update footage of the jump, and is released just in time to advertise GoPro cameras during the SuperBowl:
Nothing about this jump could be called “mainstream” but perhaps this is the start of a trend of marketing space activities as “cool” and using them to sell things on Earth? If so, we can expect more of these kind of ad campaigns when XCOR, Virgin Galactic and other Space Tourism companies start launching, perhaps as early as this year.
[…] When I last posted about a Red Bull/GoPro-marketed extreme sports event, a solitary maniac was flinging himself off a balloon from 39km above the Earth. […]