It doesn’t get any better for a brand than the summer of 2014, when the ALS Association’s Ice Bucket Challenge took America by storm. If you haven’t heard about it, you’ve been under a rock: the Ice Bucket Challenge has quite literally “soaked” the nation. Everyone from celebrities to college mascots have poured a bucket of ice water over his or her head and challenged others do the same or make a donation to fight ALS within twenty-four hours.
People have shared more than 1.2 million videos on Facebook between June 1 and Aug. 13 and mentioned the challenge more than 2.2 million times on Twitter since July 29, according to those sites. My Facebook feed was taken over by friends and family doing the challenge. I even may have been challenged, but have yet to pour the water over my head. Donations to the ALS Association have also spiked, with over 260,000 new donors.
What many people might not know is that the Ice Bucket Challenge didn’t even originate with the ALS Association. The Ice Bucket Challenge had been making the rounds on the Internet for several weeks before it was tied to ALS. Matt Lauer, the host of NBC’s Today Show, took the Ice Bucket Challenge on July 15 after being challenged by the golfer Greg Norman, but pledged money to a hospice in Florida.
However, the association with ALS took off after Pete Frates, a former baseball player for Boston University suffering from ALS, took up the Ice Bucket Challenge. Frates can no longer speak, but his Ice Bucket Challenge started the association with ALS. In late July, Frates learned about the challenge from his friend, and nominated himself for the challenge. Instead of having ice water poured on his head, he posted a video of himself bouncing his head to “Ice Ice Baby,” the 1989 hit song by the rapper Vanilla Ice. He challenged some friends, and the stunt spread quickly through Boston circles, then across the web until everyone jumped in.
So for all the people at my office who are amazed at the marketing department of the ALS association – don’t be. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a classic example of how viral marketing should work. It’s not a creation of a marketing department, but something more organic. On the subject of viral marketing, Tom Lamb, the chief marketing officer at Lowes, states, “If we start out with the intent of going viral, we drift far into a hollow message just to be entertaining. On the other hand, it’s not a matter of running an extension of your national campaign. For it to work, it’s got to be a neat little idea that connects back to your brand, but is fun or engaging in a singular way.” In this regard the Ice Bucket Challenge succeeds immensely in its singular purpose. The videos themselves are concise in their message. It’s a basic rule of marketing – Get your point across as succinctly as possible and as resonantly as possible.
So, what’s the answer to success in viral marketing? It starts with the right question: Is this something that people will connect to so quickly and viscerally they’ll want to see it again and again? If so, they’ll likely share it. The Ice Bucket Challenge hit it on the head – literally.
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Hi Heather – your post makes an important point about how ALS was able to raise money and benefit from the viral marketing efforts, and successes of others, and build upon it while making it their own. In the end, the origins of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge does not really matter for the majority of Americans, who will always identify it with the ALS Association as a result of an astoundingly successful example of viral marketing!
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I had heard that this was for any charity you wanted and then became connected to ALS. You never know when one person can make a difference and turn one event that supports many charities into an event that wholeheartedly supports one. This is an wonderful example of viral marketing, almost as good as Jared’s subway commercials!
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I have not seen an Ice Bucket Challenge post on Facebook in a few weeks so I think the buzz has finally stopped but what a buzz it was! I am glad to read that the spike in social media activity also resulted in a spike in donations to fight ALS. Without the donations all of this ice water dumping would have been done for the wrong reasons. I did not know that the challenge did not originally start as a means to raise funds to fight ALS. Can you imagine something like this happening in the pre social media world?
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