If you haven’t seen your friends do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge yet, you’re likely living under a bucket. (pun intended)

The rules for the ALS Ice bucket challenge are simple. Once you are nominated by someone, you have 24 hours to either pour a bucket of ice water over yourself or donate $100 to the ALS Association. After you’ve completed the challenge, you then nominate 3 more people to do the challenge.

The ALS association has raised millions of dollars by putting out this challenge, and could be considered a successful campaign by many definitions.

(a random example off youtube)

In digging a little deeper, however, I began thinking about why the challenge has gotten the attention that it has.

• The challenge is easy to understand – Anybody can understand how the challenge works by watching almost any other challenge video. The people who conceived of this idea made sure to keep it simple.
• The challenge is (mostly) entertaining to watch – Who doesn’t like seeing their friends dunked in ice water? Many people have gotten creative with their videos in an attempt to garner more attention and publicity. (Example of one below)
• The challenge has a quick turnaround time – 24 hours is a very quick turnaround time to force people to not procrastinate. Probably the most vital piece of this whole challenge. The concrete deadline combined with the social and public nature of these videos makes for a very quick spreading movement.
• The challenge brought awareness to a cause – For those people who are more into raising awareness than providing entertainment, the challenge provides an incentive to help explain a good cause.
• The challenge has a pyramid scheme structure – By having the ability to nominate 3 people, it creates a pyramid scheme where the challenge spreads exponentially.

Food for thought when designing your next advertising campaign.

And as promised, my vote for my favorite video: