The premise was simple: Post an Instagram photo in a snazzy outfit, tag three friends with #TheAwesomeChallenge, and children’s clothing subscription service Rockets of Awesome would donate a back-to-school outfit in kind to the children’s charity Baby2Baby. So how exactly did they manage 30 million views in just over two days?
First of all, it doesn’t hurt that both Rockets of Awesome and Baby2Baby have impeccable networks of celebrity friends. Rockets of Awesome, for one, counts among their team the likes of Rachel Blumenthal, the company’s brilliant and well-connected founder/CEO. Likewise, scroll through Baby2Baby’s Instagram feed, and from but a brief glance, the charity’s celebrity caché appears akin to something you’d find in the pages of Us Weekly: There’s Zooey Deschanel, hoisting a box of Huggies. There’s Drew Barrymore, sandwiched between the charity’s two founders in the pages of Variety. There’s Jessica Alba, posing not far from Baby2Baby signage in seemingly everyotherpost. In addition to Ms. Alba, who’s both a Baby2Baby board member and a close friend of its co-presidents, Kelly Sawyer Patricof and Norah Weinstein, there’s a spate of other celebrity moms who make up the charity’s illustrious inner circle: Julie Bowen, Nicole Richie, Kelly Rowland, Jennifer Meyer, and Rachel Zoe among them. As the New York Times recounted in a 2015 writeup on the women behind Baby2Baby, such close connections are the foundation of the organization’s success: “Baby2Baby brass also run with celebrities in a way that a previous generation did not, and they rely on those friendships to promote their charity, tweet by tweet, blog item by blog item.”
Furthermore, in our assessment of the highest-performing posts over the course of the campaign’s two-day run thus far, we were able to trace the real lifeblood of #TheAwesomeChallenge, and it all started, believe it or not, with Jason Bigg’s wife, writer-actress Jenny Mollen, whose post and subsequent tagging went on to reach seven influencers with over one million followers, accounting for 16.6 million of the campaign’s 30 million impressions. In the time since, Rockets of Awesome’s Instagram has grown, according to our software, 3.83%, up 1,287 followers. (For reference, they gained just 312 followers the week prior.) Similarly, Baby2Baby’s account grew 4.28% this week, up 1,181 followers from the previous week, in which they lost 192. Now that we’ve sorted all that out, here’s a play-by-play timeline of how the rest of it went down.
#TheAwesomeChallenge
Aug 21, 2018, 6:50 AM EST: @rocketsofawesome kicks off their campaign with a simple graphic carousel giving instructions on how to participate.
📈 Overperformance: 1.99x (+122)
8:56 AM EST: Things really start to get interesting when, a mere two hours after the campaign’s launch, Jenny Mollen posts a photo tagging three celebrity friends: Eva Chen, Busy Philipps, and Bella Thorne.
📈 Overperformance: 1.11x (+709)
10:57 AM: Two hours later, Busy Philipps accepts the challenge, and nominates five more famous women: Jen Gotch, Tess Holliday, Kelly Oxford, Michelle Monaghan, and Sophia Bush.
📈 Overperformance: 1.15x (+4,500)
11:06 AM: Sophia Bush posts a photo, and tags a gaggle of celebs, from Hilarie Burton to Michelle Monaghan, Debra Messing and Mariska Hargitay.
2:33 PM: Later that afternoon, Hilarie Burton throws her hat into #TheAwesomeChallenge ring, and tags three hyper-influential friends, who have over eight million combined followers: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Danneel Ackles, and Norman Reedus. And the chain continues…
📈 Overperformance: 2.34x (+63,800)
