Project Goals

The Partnership

We were introduced to Bad Beard, aka Sam Schneider, three days before COVID-19 / coronavirus lockdowns went into effect in Florida. Ahhh, love in the time of corona—the unwritten Gabriel García Márquez novel. 

But seriously, it was kismet as we were already tangentially connected through the motorcycle world: Resonator with MOTUL, Rust + Rebel with Harley, Indian, and X Games, and Bad Beard with all of it. ​So after meeting face-to-face,  Resonator knew we wanted to do something special to help people during COVID quarantine, and Sam was the affable, lovable personality we could use to bring it to life.

Since our goal was to get something launched quickly, we built the campaign concept in one day. After we decided we wanted this to be a physical challenge, we mapped out the core values of Bad Beard’s brand and matched them to Special Olympics, which resulted in a tangible content strategy. With that in place, Rust + Rebel got to work establishing the art direction for the campaign. 

Build an anti-fragile campaign.

Initially, we wanted to launch with 15 social media influencers who would be paired with Special Olympic athletes. However, as initial interest grew, that became an untenable goal, especially during the initial stage of COVID quarantine. Therefore, we pivoted to our plan B, opening the campaign to about 80 influencers  and then waiting for the moment when we could get more involvement from Special Olympics athletes after we built campaign momentum. 

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Importantly, we decided not to launch this through a formal partnership with Special Olympics for two reasons. One, we wanted to get to market in the next 15 days, and that kind of timeline is way too quick for a larger organization. Two, we had several corporate and personal brands we wanted to partner with, and bridging those corporate partnerships with a nonprofit can take months. So we put our own sweat and hard-money equity into the campaign and ran it ourselves.

Create a network effect.

To create a network effect with an influencer campaign, you need to build critical mass in a short period of time (see more on Metcalfe’s Law). So we pulled together Sam’s existing network of influencers and sponsors with our team’s nonprofit and business network.

Critically, we offered up the campaign assets to anyone on the Web who wanted to create some content and get in on the fun. In addition, we pulled in, well...let's call it even some non-traditional influencers...who had big hearts, big followings, and could have some fun with the content in a way that drew eyes and funding. ;)