If ten years ago I told you that there was a challenge where celebrities such as Lebron James, President George W. Bush, Bill Gates, and millions of other people across the globe dumped a bucket of Ice water on themselves to raise money for charity would you believe me? Probably not, but this did happen, and it took over the world, especially the United States for two years. This Challenge raised money for a disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named after the famous New York Yankees baseball player who developed the disease late in his career forcing him to retire. This campaign not only greatly impacted ALS, but also changed marketing forever. 

The Ice Bucket Challenge is when you are nominated and required to dump a bucket full of ice cold water on your head within 24 hours of your nomination. You also get to nominate 3 people to take on the challenge, further spreading the challenge like wildfire. The first person who took the Ice Bucket Challenge did so for a family member who was suffering from the disease, and from that point, the rest is history.

Prior to the Ice Bucket Challenge, ALS was not known very much at all. The Ice Bucket Challenge led to many doing more and more research on the disease, and led to an exponential increase in donations towards finding a cure to the illness. As a matter of fact, the Wikipedia page for ALS had only an average of 3,000 views before the Ice Bucket Challenge blew up, but after, the website reached a peak of 450,000 viewers.

ALS is a disease that attacks the nerves. It gradually takes kills all nerves in the body, leading to paralysis, and eventually death unfortunately. ALS has no cure yet, but with the funds raised by the Ice Bucket Challenge, there was some significant forms of treatment that have been discovered to slow the process even more.

The challenge caused a 187% increase in donations to the ALS Association. The ALS Association has then sent this money to help fund research to fight and eventually cure this evil disease.

ALS thrived on ethos. This is because there were so many celebrities who accepted the challenge and donated, so everyone else decided to hop on to the trend. Once Hollywood does something, people always follow. So many people took the challenge and donated to the fund to promote their self image and to contribute to a great cause.

I remember when this was going on, I was in 5th grade, 11 years old, and all I wanted was to be nominated. Eventually, my whole family was nominated. We headed down to our farm, filled the tractor bucket with ice and water, and before you knew it, we were all soaked and freezing. We did not care at all because we all knew we were doing it for a great reason. Not only did we participate in the challenge, but we also donated to the cause, and that made everyone very happy to know we were all doing something good.

Some lessons that our group learned through our research on the ice bucket challenge is that there is more than just one way of doing things. You don’t just have to set up a go fund me, go door to door, make advertisements, etc. You can market your product, or in this case, a charity, by making it fun and inclusive, make the audience members fully engaged in what you’re selling and make it something bigger than the product and the money itself. The Ice Bucket Challenge did not just impact ALS, it changed all of marketing. There are many lessons and strategies that marketers can take and have taken from this Challenge. The Ice Bucket Challenge changed the marketing world for the better and kickstarted the new era of marketing, social media marketing.