ALS Ice Bucket Challenge turns 10—how the stunt changed viral marketing forever

In 2014 a wholesome internet trend swept the world, marking a turning point in online marketing and digital media. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had millions of people dumping buckets of ice water over their heads and sharing the videos on social media. It was one of the first social video phenomena that was a precursor to today’s internet landscape—obsessed with video, short-form content and virality—and it presented an opening for brands to partake in online culture in new ways. Even though the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was created by a nonprofit, the ALS Association, for-profit brands also found newfound power in mobile, social and video marketing. KFC, Samsung, Pillsbury and more participated in the challenge, as did celebrities and influencers from Mark Zuckerberg to Justin Bieber. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, now 10 years after its peak in the summer 2014, was a formative moment for marketers who still deploy tactics learned then. “I remember at the time, the brief in every Fortune 500 company, was ‘what’s our Ice Bucket Challenge,’” said Nick Miaritis, chief client officer at VaynerMedia. “The whole industry got that brief.” Today, social media marketers are all too familiar with the edict from brands to simply “make us go viral.” Looking back on internet milestones, it’s tough to pinpoint when exactly a sea change occurred. In 2011, The Arab Spring, a mass protest movement in North Africa and the Middle East, was largely propelled by people organizing on social media. In 2009, a grainy photo was uploaded to Twitter, becoming the first eyewitness report of the airplane piloted by Sully Sullenberger that landed in the Hudson River near Manhattan. In 2013, trends such as The Harlem Shake made video more accessible, following the 2012 debut of Vine, the 6-second video app. For Facebook, especially, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge represented a massive shift. The way people used Facebook started to change just around the time the challenge was taking off, and Facebook began investing more in video. From June to September 2014, there were 17 million videos related to the Ice Bucket Challenge on Facebook, viewed more than 10 billion times by more than 440 million people, according to stats provided by Meta, which is now Facebook’s parent company. By January 2015, Facebook was generating 3 billion video views a day, a transformation that continues today. Meta has said that 50% of time spent on Instagram is from people watching Reels, its short-form video format, which it launched in 2020 to take on TikTok. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs In many ways, the Ice Bucket Challenge was a prelude to TikTok, an app fueled by simple challenges, Miaritis said. Last month, for example, people on TikTok were doing the “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” or “counting” challenge—singing eight numbers as a vocal warm-up. “The legacy of the Ice Bucket Challenge, I actually think that, weirdly, the legacy is TikTok,” Miaritis said. “When you look at the challenge and how viral that went, right, where like, millions of people made videos … that became what the internet is about.” Buckets of brands In July 2014, Florida golfer Charles Kennedy helped jumpstart the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by dumping a bucket of cold water over his head for an online video and naming ALS as the charity for further proceeds. The challenge picked up steam and soon millions of people were challenging each other to take the plunge. It reached Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bieber, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and others. Though challenged, President Barack Obama never participated. The numerous brands that jumped into it included McDonald’s, Samsung, KFC and Marriott. McDonald’s had Ronald McDonald star in its ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video. Colonel Sanders made a bucket video, and KFC launched a campaign called the KFC Ice Bucket Challenge, encouraging people to use its iconic fried chicken buckets to dump the ice water. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised $115 million in six weeks, a good haul for a nonprofit. For marketers, it showed the direct marketing appeal of social media. “Everybody was completely shocked and overwhelmed back then about how big a phenomenon it became,” said Brian Frederick, chief marketing and communications officer at ALS Association. People hardly knew what to make of the sensation at the time, Frederick said. About a year after the challenge began, Frederick was invited to speak in Dubai about it and found it still had resonance. Most people didn’t even know the origins. “It had gotten so big, people didn’t really even know what it was for,” Frederick said. “Some of the people there thought that it was for somebody named Al, like ‘Al’s,’ it was ‘Al’s Ice Bucket Challenge.’” “Some more media savvy folks, who were part of the of the lecture, they were convinced that it was all a Facebook publicity stunt, and Facebook was going big into mobile,” Frederick said. It was clear that Facebook had taken an interest in the challenge and that its cultural resonance was not lost on the company. For Facebook, the challenge pointed the way to a new paradigm, from text to video, which is an ongoing transformation at the app even a decade later. Instagram, which launched in 2010 as a photo-sharing app, was acquired by Facebook in 2012 and added video in 2013. In 2015, Facebook launched its first livestream video product, which would become Facebook Live. In 2016, BuzzFeed was among the launch partners on Facebook Live, creating a 45-minute spectacle with hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to watch BuzzFeed staff crush a watermelon under the pressure of rubber bands, which they were placing on one by one to build the drama. Today, Facebook’s video experiences have evolved from live and on-demand to formats more familiar to the TikTok fan base. And TikTok has become ground zero for challenges—they are core to the platform and how people engage with it. Brands have created challenges, and every day new trends emerge, such as the “counting” challenge this summer, which VaynerMedia’s Miaritis pointed out. More news: Creator and influencer trends to know about now Challenges have also led to some low moments in social media, revealing a tendency for internet users to engage in sometimes harmful behavior—such as “devious lick,” which allegedly was a challenge started on TikTok encouraging people to partake in petty theft. Challenges can blow back on brands, too, such as the Tide Pod Challenge, a movement that had people eating laundry detergent, causing a public health scare. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge presented an opportunity for a lighter, more innocent moment in the online space. As Frederick recalled, the terrorist group ISIS was among the big news stories of that summer. ISIS offered an internet warning sign, as the group was able to spread its propaganda online, confounding authorities and big internet platforms. In fact, one of the most indelible online images from that terror group came in August 2014, when it shared a beheading video of U.S. journalist James Foley. “It was a long, hot summer,” Frederick recalls. Amid the turmoil, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge offered some needed relief. “Facebook told us that this was the biggest thing that ever happened to their platform,” Frederick said. Meta did not make anyone available for comment for this story, but did point to the statistics around how the challenge performed. Video pioneer Juliana Constantino, executive creative director at agency Pereira O’Dell, was working at Facebook’s Creative Shop, Facebook’s in-house marketing services team, at the time of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. She recalled a convergence of forces that made the trend so popular. “I think that we had a bunch of things align at a good time, and we had a good cause, because people were sympathetic,” Constantino said. “We had the platform in its prime. I mean, everybody was on Facebook at that time. And the tools were super sharp regarding sharing and commenting. That social charge that came with Facebook was in its prime.” “The other feeling is that when we did ask the audience, it was a very easy ask, a fun ask,” Constantino said. “Sometimes, as a brand, we ask too much from the audience to engage and to participate. In this case, it was not a big ask.” Creative Shop helped market ALS Ice Bucket Challenge on Facebook, according to Constantino. “I think that the big bet [at Facebook] at that point, it had two technological factors,” Constantino said. “One was a huge investment in video, which was not the case before that. … So they did a big shift to accommodate good videos. And the other thing was mobile, because when it’s on your cellphone, it’s so easy to capture content and immediately share.” “Everything that we knew before that about going viral was related to YouTube and videos,” Constantino said. “But on Facebook, it was so much more natural. … The platform was really designed for that.” Brands certainly took notice, and social media marketing shifted around the same time as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. In 2013, Oreo had a breakout internet moment with its “dunk in the dark” tweet posted during the blackout at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. That became an iconic marketing meme that showed there was power in tying brands to culturally important moments. Twitter, though, did not have native video until 2015, and it bought video app Vine in 2016, which ultimately shut down. Looking back at the brand videos that broke through during the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, it’s clear to see how online video changed in real time. Some of the videos were shot in horizontal, landscape mode. Others, such as Old Spice’s version, were shot vertically, a sign that even the aspect ratio of content was flipping. It’s difficult to analyze hard stats about which brands and celebrities were the most popular in affiliation with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, because the data is fuzzier the further back one goes into the internet records. However, conversations around the challenge spiked between June and August 2014, according to data and social analytics firm Sprinklr. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge earned more than 7.5 million mentions on Twitter in July 2014, according to Sprinklr. The top-mentioned brands were McDonald’s, Samsung, KFC, Coca-Cola and Marriott. Dunkin’, Old Spice, Chili’s and Pillsbury also got mentions. In 2014, the challenge generated 11.5 million mentions on Twitter, which is now X, and that was higher than other nostalgic challenges measured over the years, such as the Harlem Shake, planking, the mannequin challenge and the cinnamon challenge. “Talk about nostalgia, I feel that this was one of the pioneers in this [marketing] model,” Constantino said, “where you not only got a campaign to impact your primary target, but you created a whole social movement and conversation. And this is something that we see a lot today especially on TikTok, because brands today, they actually are searching for trends to jump into.” Follow us on social media X Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn YouTube

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge turns 10—how the stunt changed viral marketing forever

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