Marketing Trivia
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120 free Marketing trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
63 free Marketing trivia questions with answers. Marketing trivia for the office quiz, the marketing class or anyone who has ever argued about the best ad of all time. It covers the famous campaigns and where they came from (Just Do It, Got Milk?, Apple's 1984, A Diamond Is Forever, the Marlboro Man, Think Small, Where's the Beef?), the mascots (Tony the Tiger, the Michelin Man, the GEICO Gecko, Betty Crocker, Ronald McDonald), the theory (the 4 and 7 Ps, AIDA, loss leaders, charm pricing), the people (Kotler, Ogilvy, Bernbach, Burnett), the firsts (the first TV commercial, the first banner ad, AdWords) and the fiascos (New Coke, the Boston LED scare). Easy questions any consumer can answer come first; later ones will test someone with a marketing degree. Digital-era items - CAN-SPAM, GDPR, Share a Coke, Old Spice - are in there too. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and carries its source, so the dates, prices and percentages are real rather than the version that gets repeated in conference keynotes.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nike's 'Just Do It' was reportedly inspired by the last words of whom?
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore said 'Let's do it' before his 1977 execution; Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy adapted it into 'Just Do It' in 1988.
Q 02How much was Carolyn Davidson paid in 1971 for designing the Nike Swoosh?
$35
$35 was the fee for about 17 hours of work billed at $2 an hour; in 1983 Phil Knight gave the Portland State design student a diamond Swoosh ring and 500 shares of Nike stock.
Q 03The Swoosh's shape was inspired by what?
The wings of a Greek goddess
The wings of a Greek goddess: Nike is the winged goddess of victory, and the Swoosh suggests motion; Blue Ribbon Sports formally became Nike, Inc. in 1978.
Q 04'Got Milk?' was created in 1993 for which client?
California's dairy board
California's dairy board, the California Milk Processor Board, hired Goodby Silverstein & Partners in 1993; the campaign's premise was the misery of running out of milk.
Q 05Who directed the first 'Got Milk?' commercial, in which a history buff can't say 'Aaron Burr' through peanut butter?
Michael Bay
Michael Bay, then a commercials director, shot the 1993 'Aaron Burr' spot two years before his feature debut Bad Boys; the national milk-moustache ads later licensed the slogan.
Q 06Apple's famous '1984' commercial, which launched the Macintosh, was directed by whom?
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott, fresh from Blade Runner, directed the spot; Apple's board hated it, and it aired nationally only once, in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.
Q 07Where did Apple's '1984' ad technically first air, in December 1983?
Twin Falls, Idaho
Twin Falls, Idaho station KMVT ran it just before midnight on December 31, 1983, so the spot would qualify for that year's advertising awards.
Q 08Advertising Age named which line the best advertising slogan of the 20th century?
A Diamond Is Forever
A Diamond Is Forever was written by Frances Gerety of N. W. Ayer for De Beers in 1947, late one night before a presentation; Ad Age ranked it first in 1999.
Q 09Before the Marlboro Man arrived in 1954, Marlboro had been marketed as what?
A women's brand, 'Mild as May'
A women's brand, 'Mild as May' was how Philip Morris sold Marlboro from 1924; Leo Burnett's cowboy then lifted it into the top four brands within a year.
Q 10Which fast-food chain's 1984 ad had Clara Peller demanding 'Where's the beef?'
Wendy's
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'.
Q 11Why is Bibendum, the Michelin Man, the colour he is?
Early tyres were pale, not black
Early tyres were pale, not black: carbon black was not added to rubber until around 1912, so the figure the Michelin brothers imagined from a stack of tyres in 1894 was white.
Q 12In his earliest posters, what did the Michelin Man do?
Smoked a cigar and wore pince-nez
Smoked a cigar and wore pince-nez: O'Galop's 1898 poster shows him raising a glass of nails and broken glass under the Latin 'Nunc est bibendum', meaning the tyre drinks up obstacles.
Q 13What are E. Jerome McCarthy's 4 Ps, set out in 1960?
Q 21Haddon Sundblom is best known for painting which advertising figure for Coca-Cola from 1931 for 33 years?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus: Sundblom painted the jolly Coca-Cola Santa from 1931 to 1964, though he did not invent the red suit; he also painted the 1957 Quaker Oats man.
Q 22What is hidden in the negative space of the FedEx logo?
An arrow between the E and x
An arrow between the E and x, formed by the negative space, is Lindon Leader's 1994 design for Landor Associates; it suggests speed and precision.
Q 23How much did a 30-second commercial cost at the first Super Bowl in 1967?
$37,500
Product, price, place, promotion
Product, price, place, promotion are McCarthy's 4 Ps from his 1960 textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, which boiled an earlier, longer list of ingredients down to four.
Q 14Which 'father of modern marketing' wrote the 1967 textbook Marketing Management?
Philip Kotler
Philip Kotler wrote Marketing Management in 1967 and has revised it through more than fifteen editions; he holds an MIT PhD in economics.
Q 15Which company aired the world's first TV commercial, on July 1, 1941, before a Brooklyn Dodgers game?
Bulova
Bulova paid about $9 for the spot on New York's WNBT: a clock face over a map of the United States with the line 'America runs on Bulova time'.
Q 16The first clickable web banner ad, run on HotWired in October 1994, was bought by which company?
AT&T
AT&T bought the banner as part of its 'You Will' campaign; it read 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.'
Q 17What was the click-through rate on the first clickable web banner ad, in 1994?
About 44%
About 44% of HotWired readers who saw the banner clicked it, a novelty-driven rate; by the 2000s typical banner click-through had fallen below one percent.
Q 18How many days did New Coke last before Coca-Cola announced the return of the original formula in 1985?
79
79 days: launched April 23 and abandoned July 11, 1985 after tens of thousands of angry calls, with president Don Keough saying 'We're not that dumb, and we're not that smart.'
Q 19What prompted Coca-Cola to reformulate its drink as New Coke?
Taste tests favouring sweeter Pepsi
Taste tests favouring sweeter Pepsi drove the change: the Pepsi Challenge, begun in 1975, had been beating Coke in blind sip tests at shopping malls for a decade.
Q 20Which rival gave its employees the day off to celebrate New Coke's launch in 1985?
PepsiCo
PepsiCo: Pepsi-Cola chief Roger Enrico declared a company holiday and ran full-page ads claiming 'the other guy just blinked' when New Coke was announced in April 1985.
$37,500 was the going rate for 30 seconds at the January 1967 game, which CBS and NBC both televised; by the 2020s a slot cost around $7 million.
Q 24Which brand's 'Puppy Love' ad topped USA Today's Ad Meter at the 2014 Super Bowl?
Budweiser and its Clydesdales
Budweiser and its Clydesdales took the 2014 Ad Meter with 'Puppy Love', a Labrador puppy befriending a Clydesdale; the brand had also won the previous year with 'Brotherhood'.
Q 25Which agency made Volkswagen's 1959 'Think Small', Advertising Age's campaign of the century?
Doyle Dane Bernbach
Doyle Dane Bernbach's Helmut Krone and Julian Koenig put a tiny Beetle on a mostly white page; the 'Lemon' ad came from the same brief.
Q 26Tony the Tiger debuted in 1952 as the mascot for which cereal?
Frosted Flakes
Frosted Flakes, then Sugar Frosted Flakes, launched in 1952 with Tony; Thurl Ravenscroft growled 'They're gr-r-reat!' for five decades.
Q 27Which rival mascot lost out to Tony the Tiger on cereal boxes in the early 1950s?
Katy the Kangaroo
Katy the Kangaroo shared the first boxes with Tony in 1952 but was dropped within the year, as were Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu.
Q 28The GEICO Gecko speaks with which accent?
Cockney
Cockney: since 2005 the Gecko has been voiced by English actor Jake Wood, formerly of EastEnders; Kelsey Grammer voiced the earlier, posher version in 1999.
Q 29What does the marketing acronym AIDA stand for?
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action is the sequence usually credited to E. St. Elmo Lewis around 1898; it is the ancestor of every marketing funnel.
Q 30Google Ads launched in October 2000 under what name?
AdWords
AdWords launched in October 2000 with about 350 advertisers; it was renamed Google Ads in 2018 and charges per click through an auction.