70 Fun Facts About Marketing

Nike's 'Just Do It' was reportedly inspired by the last words of whom?

Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy coined it in 1988; Nike's share of the North American sports-shoe market went from 18% to 43% in the following decade.

How much was Carolyn Davidson paid in 1971 for designing the Nike Swoosh?

She was a Portland State design student; in 1983 Phil Knight gave her a diamond Swoosh ring and 500 shares of stock, since split into 32,000.

The Swoosh's shape was inspired by what?

Nike is the winged Greek goddess of victory; the company had been called Blue Ribbon Sports until 1971.

'Got Milk?' was created in 1993 for which client?

Goodby Silverstein & Partners wrote it; the first ad, 'Aaron Burr', was directed by a young Michael Bay.

Who directed the first 'Got Milk?' commercial, in which a history buff can't say 'Aaron Burr' through peanut butter?

The milk-moustache print ads were a separate licence to the national MilkPEP body, which dropped the slogan for 'Milk Life' in 2014.

Apple's famous '1984' commercial, which launched the Macintosh, was directed by whom?

Chiat/Day's Lee Clow and Steve Hayden conceived it; Apple's board hated it, and it aired nationally only once, in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.

Apple's '1984' ad technically first aired in December 1983 in which unlikely place?

Chiat/Day ran it on a local station on New Year's Eve to qualify for that year's awards.

Advertising Age named which line the best advertising slogan of the 20th century?

Frances Gerety of N. W. Ayer wrote it for De Beers in 1947, late one night before a presentation, and it made the diamond engagement ring standard.

Before the Marlboro Man arrived in 1954, Marlboro had been marketed as what?

Leo Burnett's cowboy turned it into a top-four brand within a year; two of the men who played him later died of lung cancer.

Which fast-food chain's 1984 ad had Clara Peller demanding 'Where's the beef?'

Walter Mondale borrowed the line against Gary Hart in a presidential debate; Peller was dropped in 1985 after telling a Prego ad 'I found it'.

Why is Bibendum, the Michelin Man, the colour he is?

He was born at the 1894 Lyon Exhibition when the Michelin brothers saw a stack of tyres shaped like a man; his name comes from Horace's 'Nunc est bibendum'.

The Michelin Man is one of the world's oldest trademarks. In his early depictions he did what?

Cartoonist O'Galop drew him for the Michelin brothers; the Latin motto under him translates 'Now is the time to drink' - i.e. the tyre drinks up obstacles.

What are the 4 Ps of the marketing mix, as set out by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960?

Booms and Bitner added people, process and physical evidence for services in 1981; Lauterborn's customer-side 4 Cs came in 1990.

Which 'father of modern marketing' wrote the 1967 textbook Marketing Management?

He taught at Northwestern's Kellogg School from 1962 to 2018 and holds an MIT PhD in economics.

Which company aired the world's first TV commercial, on July 1, 1941, before a Brooklyn Dodgers game?

It was a modified test card shaped like a clock and cost somewhere between $4 and $9 of airtime.

The first clickable web banner ad, run on HotWired in October 1994, was bought by which company?

It read 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.' - and 44 percent of people who saw it did.

What was the click-through rate on that first-ever web banner ad in 1994?

Banner click rates today are typically well under one percent.

How many days did New Coke last before Coca-Cola announced the return of the original formula in 1985?

Launched April 23 and abandoned July 11 after tens of thousands of angry calls; company president Don Keough said 'We're not that dumb, and we're not that smart.'

What prompted Coca-Cola to reformulate its drink as New Coke?

The Pepsi Challenge, begun in 1975, had been humiliating Coke at shopping malls for a decade.

Malcolm Gladwell's critique of the Pepsi Challenge argued that a single sip favours what?

People may prefer a less sweet drink over a whole can, which is why Coke's taste-test victory turned into the New Coke disaster.

Haddon Sundblom is best known for painting which advertising figure for Coca-Cola from 1931 for 33 years?

He is often wrongly credited with inventing the red-suited Santa; he also drew the 1957 Quaker Oats man.

What is hidden in the negative space of the FedEx logo?

Lindon Leader of Landor Associates designed it in 1994; the company had been founded as Federal Express in 1971 by Fred Smith.

How much did a 30-second commercial cost at the first Super Bowl in 1967?

By 2026 the price was around $8 million; a 2010 Nielsen study found 51% of viewers enjoy the ads more than the game.

Which brand's Super Bowl ads have won USA Today's annual Ad Meter poll 14 times?

Advertising Age readers separately voted Coca-Cola's 1980 'Hey Kid, Catch!' with Mean Joe Greene the best Super Bowl ad ever.

Which agency made Volkswagen's 1959 'Think Small', Advertising Age's campaign of the century?

Art director Helmut Krone and copywriter Julian Koenig put a tiny Beetle on a mostly white page; the 'Lemon' ad came from the same brief.

Tony the Tiger debuted in 1952 as the mascot for which cereal?

He saw off Katy the Kangaroo, Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu within a year; Thurl Ravenscroft growled 'They're gr-r-reat!' for five decades.

Which rival mascot lost out to Tony the Tiger on cereal boxes in the early 1950s?

Eugene Kolkey at the Leo Burnett agency drew Tony; the also-rans were dropped within the year.

The GEICO Gecko speaks with which accent?

English actor Jake Wood voices him; Kelsey Grammer was one of the earlier voices, and GEICO spent over $1.1 billion on ads in 2012.

What does the marketing acronym AIDA stand for?

The formula is usually credited to E. St. Elmo Lewis around 1898; it is the ancestor of every marketing 'funnel'.

Google Ads launched in October 2000 under what name?

It was renamed Google Ads in 2018 and charges advertisers per click through an auction.

Isaiah Mustafa's 2010 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' campaign was for which brand?

Wieden+Kennedy followed up with 186 personalised video replies to fans in two and a half days; Old Spice dates from 1937.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty was launched by Unilever in which year?

Its 2006 film 'Evolution' won two Cannes Grand Prix and the 2013 'Real Beauty Sketches' went viral.

Coca-Cola's 'Share a Coke' campaign, with first names on bottles, began in which country in 2011?

It rolled out to more than 80 countries and in the US reversed a decade of falling Coke consumption.

The term 'guerrilla marketing' was popularised by whose 1984 book?

A notorious example: the 2007 Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED signs mistaken for bombs in Boston.

What does the 'SPAM' in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 stand for?

Signed by George W. Bush in December 2003, it requires a working unsubscribe link and is enforced by the FTC.

Under the EU's GDPR, fines can reach up to what share of a company's annual worldwide turnover?

Or 20 million euros, whichever is greater; the regulation was adopted in April 2016 and became enforceable in May 2018.

Which 'Father of Advertising' wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man in 1963?

His Rolls-Royce ad ran 'At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock'; the Hathaway shirt man wore an eyepatch.

Complete the 1955 maxim of the 'Father of Advertising': 'The consumer is not a moron, she's...'

His Hathaway shirt man and Schweppes' Commander Whitehead came from the same shop, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.

Which advertising agency employs Don Draper in Mad Men?

The show, set 1960-70, was the first basic-cable series to win the drama Emmy, four years running.

Which candy saw sales surge up to 300% after appearing in E.T., a deal Mars had turned down?

Hershey took the product-placement offer Mars refused; the candy had only launched in 1978.

Product placement is nearly as old as cinema. Which soap appeared in Lumiere films as early as 1896?

The films were shot at the request of a Lever Brothers representative in France; a century later FedEx got a whole movie, Cast Away.

Who first played Ronald McDonald in 1963 local TV ads in Washington, DC?

Scott had been Bozo the Clown on WRC-TV; the character has appeared far less since the 2016 'creepy clown' sightings.

The fictional baking expert Betty, created in 1921 to answer letters, took her surname from what?

Fortune ranked the fictional homemaker the second most popular woman in America in 1945, behind only Eleanor Roosevelt.

The word 'slogan' comes from a Gaelic term meaning what?

Sluagh-ghairm was a Highland battle cry; the earliest advertising slogan the Wikipedia article cites is 'Beechams Pills: Worth a guinea a box' from 1859.

Coca-Cola's 1971 'Hilltop' ad was filmed on a hill outside which city?

McCann Erickson's Bill Backer got the idea stuck at Shannon Airport; the New Seekers' version sold 12 million copies and the ad closes the Mad Men finale.

Apple's 'Think different' slogan (1997-2002) came from which agency's Los Angeles office?

Steve Jobs insisted on 'different' as a noun, like 'think victory'; the 'Crazy Ones' spot narrated by Richard Dreyfuss won the 1998 Emmy for best commercial.

A product deliberately sold below cost to lure shoppers in is called what?

Costco's $1.50 hot-dog-and-soda combo, unchanged since 1985, is the textbook example.

One theory says prices like $9.99 began as a control on what?

Odd pricing forces the clerk to open the register for change; researchers also find shoppers read $9.99 as meaningfully cheaper than $10.

The '7 Ps' of services marketing add which three to McCarthy's original four?

Booms and Bitner proposed the extension in 1981 because a haircut or a flight cannot be inventoried like a product.

Neil Borden is credited with popularising which foundational two-word term from the late 1940s?

He said a colleague's image of the marketer as a 'mixer of ingredients' inspired it; McCarthy later boiled the mix down to four Ps.

The first spam email, sent over the ARPANET in 1978, advertised which computer company?

Marketer Gary Thuerk's pitch for the DECSYSTEM-20 reached about 400 users and reportedly generated $13 million in sales, despite an almost universally hostile reaction.

The hashtag as a way of grouping posts was first proposed on Twitter in 2007 by which product consultant?

His August 23, 2007 tweet asked how people felt about using the pound sign for groups, 'as in #barcamp'. Twitter's founders were initially unimpressed.

In April 2007 Google agreed to buy which online display-advertising company for $3.1 billion in cash?

The deal took nearly a year to close because of antitrust reviews in both the US and the EU, and it made Google the dominant force in display as well as search ads.

Google Analytics, launched in 2005, was built on the technology of which company Google bought that year?

Traces of the acquisition survive in the 'utm_' tags on tracked links, which stand for Urchin Tracking Module.

Hotmail, the pioneer of free web-based email, chose which symbolic date for its 1996 commercial launch?

The date was meant to signal 'freedom' from ISP-tied email; the tagline appended to every outgoing message became a textbook example of viral marketing, and Microsoft bought the service the following year for a reported $400 million.

The 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge raised money for which disease?

Within about three weeks the ALS Association had received $41.8 million from more than 739,000 new donors, and the challenge eventually funded research that identified new disease-linked genes.

Google's original ranking algorithm, PageRank, is named partly after which of the company's co-founders?

The name is also a pun on 'web page'. Page and Brin developed the algorithm at Stanford in 1996 and published the paper describing it in 1998.

Which animals stand behind Jawed Karim in the first YouTube video, uploaded in April 2005?

The 19-second clip 'Me at the zoo' was shot at the San Diego Zoo; Karim's remark that the animals have 'really, really, really long trunks' launched a platform that by the 2020s ran billions of ads a day.

In which year did Amazon launch its Associates affiliate program?

Amazon did not invent affiliate marketing; William J. Tobin's PC Flowers & Gifts had been paying commissions on Prodigy since 1989 and patented the concept.

Per analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase 'search engine optimization' came into use in which year?

Webmasters had been tweaking pages for AltaVista and Yahoo since the mid-1990s; Google's later Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) updates were aimed at the industry's excesses.

Facebook bought Instagram in April 2012 for roughly how much in cash and stock?

Instagram had launched on iOS on October 6, 2010, and had about 13 employees at the time of the sale; $19 billion was the price Facebook later paid for WhatsApp.

What share of revenue does Google say it pays to publishers on its AdSense content network?

AdSense launched in March 2003 as 'content targeting advertising'; the AdSense name came from Applied Semantics, a company Google bought the following month.

Which financial-software company bought Mailchimp for about $12 billion in November 2021?

Mailchimp began in 2001 as a side project of a web-design agency and took its name from one of the founders' popular e-greeting-card characters.

Which 1859 British product had the first ad slogan, 'Worth a guinea a box'?

The phrase was supposedly uttered by a satisfied customer from St Helens, Lancashire, and helped the firm become a global brand.

Thomas Barratt, the Guinness-listed first brand manager, worked from 1865 for which soap?

He pushed a strong exclusive brand image and saturation campaigns, and is called 'the father of modern advertising'.

Worldwide advertising spending in 2025 was estimated to exceed what figure?

In 2024, 59.4% went to digital, 24.9% to TV and just 0.4% to cinema.

In which country was mobile advertising first launched, in 2000?

The same country had seen the first paid downloadable mobile content in 1998.

Which Harvard professor first described marketers as 'mixers of ingredients' in a 1948 article?

His colleague Neil Borden later credited that image as the inspiration for the term 'marketing mix'.

Who proposed the consumer-oriented '4 Cs' as a replacement for the 4 Ps in 1990?

A Japanese professor, Koichi Shimizu, had already proposed a different 4 Cs in 1973 and expanded it into a 7 Cs Compass Model in 1979.

At which business school did Philip Kotler teach marketing from 1962 to 2018?

He earned his master's in economics at the University of Chicago without finishing a bachelor's degree and has written over 80 books.