70 Fun Facts About Marketing

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

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.

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

$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.

The Swoosh's shape was inspired by what?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Where did Apple's '1984' ad technically first air, in December 1983?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

In his earliest posters, what did the Michelin Man do?

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.

What are E. Jerome McCarthy's 4 Ps, set out in 1960?

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.

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

Philip Kotler wrote Marketing Management in 1967 and has revised it through more than fifteen editions; he holds an MIT PhD in economics.

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

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'.

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

AT&T bought the banner as part of its 'You Will' campaign; it read 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.'

What was the click-through rate on the first clickable web banner ad, in 1994?

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.

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

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.'

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

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.

Which rival gave its employees the day off to celebrate New Coke's launch in 1985?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

$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.

Which brand's 'Puppy Love' ad topped USA Today's Ad Meter at the 2014 Super Bowl?

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'.

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

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.

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

Frosted Flakes, then Sugar Frosted Flakes, launched in 1952 with Tony; 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?

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.

The GEICO Gecko speaks with which accent?

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.

What does the marketing acronym AIDA stand for?

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action is the sequence 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?

AdWords launched in October 2000 with about 350 advertisers; it was renamed Google Ads in 2018 and charges 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?

2004: Unilever launched the campaign with billboards of non-model women and a tick-box vote; its 2006 film 'Evolution' won two Cannes Grand Prix.

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

Australia was first, in the summer of 2011, with 150 of the country's most popular names on bottles; the idea then spread to more than 80 countries.

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

Jay Conrad Levinson's 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing coined the term for low-budget, unconventional tactics; a notorious example is the 2007 Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED sign scare in Boston.

What does CAN-SPAM, the name of the 2003 US email law, stand for?

Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing is the full name; George W. Bush signed it in December 2003, it requires a working unsubscribe mechanism, and the FTC enforces it.

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

4% of worldwide annual turnover or 20 million euros, whichever is greater, is the top tier; 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?

David Ogilvy wrote the Rolls-Royce line 'At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock' and put an eyepatch on the Hathaway shirt man.

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?

Sterling Cooper, later Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, is the fictional Madison Avenue agency; the show, set 1960-70, was the first basic-cable series to win the drama Emmy, four years running.

Which candy's sales surged after appearing in E.T., a product placement Mars had turned down?

Reese's Pieces benefited after Hershey took the placement Mars had refused for M&M's; the candy had only launched in 1978.

Which soap appeared in Lumière films as early as 1896, an early product placement?

Sunlight soap crates feature in 1896 Lumière shorts such as 'Washing Day in Switzerland', arranged by Lever's Swiss agent François-Henri Lavanchy-Clarke; a century later FedEx was central to Cast Away.

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

Willard Scott, later the Today show weatherman, had played Bozo the Clown on WRC-TV; McDonald's scaled back the character's appearances after the 2016 'creepy clown' sightings.

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

A company director, William Crocker, a retired Washburn-Crosby executive, lent the surname; 'Betty' was chosen as friendly, and Fortune ranked her America's second most popular woman in 1945, behind Eleanor Roosevelt.

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

Army cry: sluagh-ghairm combines sluagh, an army or host, with gairm, a cry or shout; it was the battle cry of Scottish Highland clans and entered English as 'slogorne' in the 1500s.

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

Rome: the ad was shot on a hillside at Manziana, north of the city, after rain ruined the planned shoot on the cliffs of Dover; Bill Backer of McCann Erickson conceived it at Shannon Airport.

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

TBWA\Chiat\Day's Lee Clow led the campaign; Jobs insisted on 'different' as a noun, like 'think victory', and 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?

A loss leader is priced below cost to draw in shoppers who then buy profitable items; supermarkets have long used milk, bread and Thanksgiving turkeys this way.

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

Cashiers pocketing round sums was the worry: odd prices force the clerk to open the register to make change, creating a record; shoppers also read $9.99 as meaningfully cheaper than $10.

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

People, process, physical evidence: 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?

Marketing mix: Borden said a colleague's image of the marketer as a 'mixer of ingredients' inspired the term, which he used from the late 1940s; McCarthy later boiled the mix down to four Ps.

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

Digital Equipment Corporation marketer Gary Thuerk pitched the DECSYSTEM-20 to about 400 ARPANET users on May 3, 1978, drawing an almost universally hostile reaction.

Who first proposed the hashtag as a way of grouping posts on Twitter, in 2007?

Chris Messina's August 23, 2007 tweet asked how people felt about using the pound sign for groups, 'as in #barcamp'; Twitter only made hashtags clickable in 2009.

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

DoubleClick, the display-ad server, was announced in April 2007 and closed in March 2008 after US and EU antitrust reviews; it made Google a 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?

Urchin Software, bought in April 2005, supplied the technology; traces 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?

July 4 was chosen to signal freedom from ISP-tied email; the 'Get your free email at Hotmail' line appended to every message became the textbook case of viral marketing.

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 is named partly after which person?

Larry Page gives PageRank its name, which is also a pun on 'web page'; he and Sergey Brin developed it 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?

Elephants: the 19-second clip 'Me at the zoo', shot at the San Diego Zoo, has Karim noting that they have 'really, really, really long trunks'.

Which kind of marketing did Seth Godin's 1999 book of the same name champion?

Permission marketing is the title of Godin's 1999 book, which argued for sending anticipated, personal and relevant messages only to people who have opted in; he wrote it while at Yahoo.

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

1997 is the year Sullivan traced for the phrase; webmasters had been tweaking pages for AltaVista and Yahoo since the mid-1990s, and Google's Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) updates targeted the industry's excesses.

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

About $1bn in cash and stock was the announced price; Instagram, launched on iOS on October 6, 2010, had just 13 employees, and $19 billion was what Facebook later paid for WhatsApp.

In online advertising, the 'M' in a CPM rate prices ads per what?

Thousand impressions: the M is the Latin mille, so CPM is the price an advertiser pays for every 1,000 times an ad is shown, the standard unit for display advertising.

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

Intuit, maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, closed the deal on November 1, 2021; Mailchimp had begun in 2001 as a side project of an Atlanta web-design agency.

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

Beecham's Pills used the line from 1859; the phrase was supposedly uttered by a satisfied customer in St Helens, Lancashire, and Thomas Beecham built a global patent-medicine business on it.

Thomas J. Barratt, the Victorian advertising pioneer, joined which soap firm in 1865?

Pears: Barratt married into the Pears family, bought Millais's painting 'Bubbles' for the brand and ran saturation campaigns, earning the title 'father of modern advertising'.

A 1931 Procter & Gamble memo by Neil McElroy is credited with founding what discipline?

Brand management: McElroy's memo proposed 'brand men' to take responsibility for each P&G product, such as Camay soap; he later became P&G president and US Secretary of Defense.

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

Finland: the first mobile ads were SMS messages sent there in 2000, two years after Radiolinja had sold the first paid downloadable ringtones in 1998.

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

James Culliton, in a 1948 Harvard study of marketing costs, described the executive as a 'mixer of ingredients'; Neil Borden later credited the image as his inspiration.

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

Robert Lauterborn, an advertising professor at the University of North Carolina, proposed consumer, cost, convenience and communication in a 1990 Advertising Age column.

At which business school did the author of Marketing Management teach from 1962?

Kellogg at Northwestern is where the 'father of modern marketing' spent his career from 1962, holding the S.C. Johnson chair; he earned a Chicago master's in economics without finishing a bachelor's degree.