Advertising
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50 free Advertising trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Advertising is the one art form nobody asks for and everybody remembers. A good campaign can change what people eat for breakfast, what they give when they propose and even how they picture Christmas, and the stories behind those campaigns are often stranger than the ads themselves. This quiz covers the whole business: landmark campaigns and the mascots that fronted them, the agencies and admen who built the industry, the first commercials on radio, television and the web, the tricks of persuasion that copywriters rely on, the different types of advertisement, and the rules that keep claims honest. It is written for anyone who works in the ad business or studies it, for teams planning an agency quiz night, and for anyone who has ever hummed a jingle against their will. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play it straight through or print the questions for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which company's ad campaign, begun in the late 1930s, turned the diamond engagement ring into an American custom?
De Beers
De Beers faced a market where, before World War II, only 10% of American engagement rings held a diamond. US diamond sales then rose from $23 million in 1939 to $2.1 billion in 1979.
Q 02Which Christmas character did copywriter Robert L. May create in 1939 for a Montgomery Ward giveaway booklet?
Rudolph
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began as a free storybook for shoppers' children, and the department store handed out 2.4 million copies in the first year.
Q 03Which children's author drew advertisements for Flit bug spray before publishing his first book in 1937?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss, then plain Theodor Geisel, said he got the Flit job after an ad executive's wife spotted one of his magazine cartoons at her hairdresser's.
Q 04Which candy's sales soared after it was used to lure the alien in Steven Spielberg's 1982 film E.T.?
Reese's Pieces
Reese's Pieces got the part only because Mars turned down an offer to feature M&M's. Hershey said yes, and sales of its fairly new candy rose by perhaps as much as 300%.
Q 05The Energizer Bunny first appeared in the late 1980s as a parody of which rival battery brand's drumming rabbit?
Duracell
Duracell launched its pink drumming bunny in 1973 and still uses it across most of the world, though not in the United States or Canada.
Q 06Which pop star's hair caught fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in Los Angeles in January 1984?
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson suffered second-degree burns to his scalp when pyrotechnics went off during a staged concert at the Shrine Auditorium. His family's Pepsi deal was a record $5 million.
Q 07Which British director shot Apple's "1984" commercial, in which an athlete hurls a sledgehammer at a giant screen?
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott had released the dystopian Blade Runner in 1982. Agency Chiat/Day first ran the ad in Twin Falls, Idaho, on the last night of 1983.
Q 08Which television drama follows Don Draper, creative director at the fictional 1960s New York agency Sterling Cooper?
Mad Men
Mad Men took its title from a supposed nickname for the admen of Madison Avenue. Its agency pitches real brands, among them Lucky Strike, Hilton hotels and Life cereal.
Q 09Which mouthwash, once sold as a floor cleaner, took off in the 1920s when its ads warned of "halitosis"?
Listerine
Listerine turned bad breath into a medical-sounding condition, and its maker's revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million in seven years.
Q 10Madison Avenue, shorthand for the American advertising industry since the 1920s, runs through which New York borough?
Manhattan
Manhattan's best-known street of admen takes its name from Madison Square, itself named after the fourth US president. It runs north from 23rd Street to Harlem.
Q 11Which watchmaker paid a few dollars in July 1941 for what is counted as the first American TV commercial?
Bulova
Bulova's spot ran on New York station WNBT before a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game. It showed a test pattern dressed up as a clock, with the second hand sweeping for one minute.
Q 12Which company paid for the first banner ad sold by the web magazine HotWired in October 1994?
AT&T
AT&T's rectangle is usually remembered as the first banner ad, although Time Warner's Pathfinder site had gone online with banners three days earlier.
Q 13Which cigarette brand, first marketed to women, was relaunched for men in the 1950s with rugged cowboy ads?
Marlboro
Marlboro changed course after 1950s studies linked smoking to lung cancer. Filters were thought feminine, and the cowboy made a filtered cigarette acceptable to worried men.
Q 21Which independent agency, based in Portland, Oregon since 1982, is best known for its long run of Nike advertising?
Wieden+Kennedy
Wieden+Kennedy was founded on April Fools' Day 1982 by two admen who took Nike on as a client. One of them, Dan Wieden, later coined the brand's famous three-word tagline.
Q 22Which London agency, founded in 1970, worked on the Conservative Party's 1979 election campaign?
Saatchi & Saatchi
Saatchi & Saatchi was started by Baghdad-born brothers Charles and Maurice, and went on to long-running campaigns for British Airways and Silk Cut cigarettes.
Q 23Which advertising giant, built by Martin Sorrell from 1985, began as a British maker of wire shopping baskets?
WPP
Q 14Which Kellogg's breakfast cereal has cartoon mascot Tony the Tiger promoted since his debut in 1952?
Frosted Flakes
Frosted Flakes launched with rival mascots including Katy the Kangaroo, Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu. All were dropped within a year, leaving Tony the box to himself.
Q 15Which championship game sold 30-second commercials for about $40,000 when it was first played, in January 1967?
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl was shown on both CBS and NBC that day, the only time two big networks have carried it at once. By 2000, a 30-second spot cost around $2.2 million.
Q 16Which candidate's 1964 "Daisy" campaign ad, showing a small girl and a nuclear blast, officially aired only once?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign pulled the spot after one broadcast, but news programmes kept replaying it for free. The three-year-old in the meadow miscounts as she picks the petals.
Q 17Which future pop artist won awards in 1950s New York for his shoe advertisements for the I. Miller company?
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol spent a decade as a commercial illustrator, starting with shoe drawings for a magazine in 1949. His I. Miller ads earned an Art Directors Club award in 1956.
Q 18Which German carmaker's plain-spoken Doyle Dane Bernbach ads sold Americans on a small, odd-looking car in the 1960s?
Volkswagen
Volkswagen's ads used plain black-and-white photographs when rivals favoured flattering illustrations. In 1999 Advertising Age voted the series the best campaign of the century.
Q 19Which British-born adman, often called the Father of Advertising, wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man in 1963?
David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy came to the business sideways: he had been a kitchen hand at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, sold AGA cooking stoves door to door and worked in polling for Gallup.
Q 20Which adman's Chicago agency, founded in 1935, created Tony the Tiger and the Pillsbury Doughboy?
Leo Burnett
Leo Burnett opened in the middle of the Depression with eight employees and three clients. His agency later added the Maytag Repairman to its cast of characters.
WPP stands for Wire and Plastic Products. Sorrell wanted a small listed company to build on, and within two years it had bought J. Walter Thompson for $566 million.
Q 24Which American city was home to both Volney Palmer's pioneering advertising agency and, from 1869, N. W. Ayer & Son?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Palmer wrote no ads himself: like other early agents, he dealt in newspaper space. Francis Ayer was 21 when he started his agency, which he named after his father.
Q 25Which thriller writer was an advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson until leaving the business in 1996?
James Patterson
James Patterson was a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt when he took the agency job. He published his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, in 1976 while still an adman.
Q 26Which nephew of Sigmund Freud staged a 1929 Easter parade stunt in which women lit cigarettes as symbols of freedom?
Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays was working for the maker of Lucky Strike, which wanted more women to smoke in public. He is often called the father of public relations.
Q 27Which French Riviera city became the permanent home of advertising's annual Lions awards festival in 1984?
Cannes
Cannes shared the festival with Venice for decades, which explains the trophy: the Lion was inspired by the winged lion statue at the Piazza San Marco.
Q 28Which adwoman behind Braniff's brightly painted jets became the first female CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company?
Mary Wells Lawrence
Mary Wells Lawrence founded her own agency in 1966 after being denied a promised promotion. By 1969 she was reported to be the highest-paid executive in advertising.
Q 29Which of the seven classic propaganda devices tells shoppers that everyone else is already buying a product?
Bandwagon
Bandwagon appeals take their name from the wagon that carried the musicians in a circus parade. The seven devices were listed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, founded in 1937.
Q 30Which technique did James Vicary claim in 1957 to have tested on filmgoers, before admitting it was a gimmick?
Subliminal messages
Subliminal messages flashed for 1/3,000 of a second had, he said, lifted popcorn and soft drink sales at a cinema. In 1962 he admitted his data was too small to be meaningful.