Commercial & Jingle Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
162 free Commercial & Jingle trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This commercial trivia quiz covers the ads themselves: the mascots, the jingles, the catchphrases and the campaigns that people can still recite decades later. Cereal boxes (Tony, Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Trix rabbit, Cap'n Crunch), fast food (Ronald, the Hamburglar, the Taco Bell chihuahua, Where's the beef?), insurance (the Gecko, the Cavemen, Flo, Jake, Mayhem, the Aflac duck), beer (the frogs, Whassup, Spuds, the Clydesdales, Dilly Dilly), soda (Mean Joe Greene, Hilltop, the polar bears, the Pepsi Challenge) and the landmark spots like Apple's 1984, VW's Think Small and Old Spice's man on a horse. If it is slogans you are after, our advertising slogans quiz is the place; for game-day ads specifically, try the Super Bowl commercials quiz. The easy questions are the ones any TV watcher knows: which cereal Tony sells, which brand the drumming pink bunny belongs to, who says 'Oh, yeah!' through a wall. Then it gets harder: who voiced Tony for fifty years, which short film Whassup was based on, why the 1984 ad ran once in Idaho before the Super Bowl, what the first radio jingle sold in 1926, and which company owned the drumming bunny first. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the campaign or character before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
30 of 162 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did the first radio commercial jingle, aired in December 1926, advertise?
Wheaties
Wheaties' 'Have You Tried Wheaties?' jingle aired on WCCO Minneapolis on Christmas Eve 1926; strong Twin Cities sales persuaded General Mills to keep the cereal and take the jingle national.
Q 02The first official paid TV commercial, in 1941, was for which brand?
Bulova
Bulova paid less than $10 for the spot on New York's WNBT on July 1, 1941, the first day US stations were allowed to sell airtime; it showed a clock face just before a Dodgers-Phillies game.
Q 03The first TV ad in the UK, in 1955, was for what?
Toothpaste
Toothpaste: Gibbs SR's spot went out at 8.12pm on 22 September 1955, the opening night of ITV, Britain's first commercial channel; until then British viewers had only the ad-free BBC.
Q 04Which cereal does Tony the Tiger sell?
Frosted Flakes
Tony the Tiger has fronted Kellogg's Frosted Flakes (originally Sugar Frosted Flakes) since the cereal launched in 1952, outlasting co-mascot Katy the Kangaroo within a few years.
Q 05Who provided Tony the Tiger's deep bass voice for five decades?
Thurl Ravenscroft
Thurl Ravenscroft voiced Tony the Tiger for more than 50 years, until his death in 2005; he also sang 'You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch', but a missing credit led many to assume it was Boris Karloff.
Q 06Which cereal took its bee mascot, Buzz, off the box in 2017 to highlight declining bee populations?
Honey Nut Cheerios
Honey Nut Cheerios left a blank space where Buzz usually stands and gave away free wildflower seeds; ecologists then warned that some of the flowers could turn invasive in places where they aren't native.
Q 07Who first played Ronald McDonald on TV in 1963?
Willard Scott
Willard Scott, later the Today show weatherman, first played Ronald McDonald on Washington's WRC-TV in 1963 after playing Bozo there from 1959 to 1962.
Q 08Which McDonaldland character started out evil, stealing milkshakes?
Grimace
Grimace debuted in 1971 as 'Evil Grimace', a four-armed shake thief; McDonald's later softened him into a gentle friend and sold a Grimace birthday shake in 2023.
Q 09Who sued McDonald's claiming McDonaldland plagiarized their children's TV show?
Sid and Marty Krofft
Sid and Marty Krofft won: a jury found McDonaldland copied H.R. Pufnstuf, with Mayor McCheese too close to Pufnstuf himself, and the Ninth Circuit upheld the verdict in 1977.
Q 10Which McDonald's sandwich did franchisee Jim Delligatti create in 1967?
Big Mac
The Big Mac started at Delligatti's restaurant in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and was on every US McDonald's menu the following year; he went on to run 48 of the chain's restaurants.
Q 11McDonald's 'I'm lovin' it' campaign came from an agency outside the United States, based in which country?
Germany
German agency Heye & Partner of Unterhaching, near Munich, created the campaign; it launched in Germany on 2 September 2003 as 'ich liebe es' before rolling out worldwide.
Q 12Who sang the vocals on the original 2003 'I'm lovin' it' spots?
Justin Timberlake
Justin Timberlake sang the jingle, produced by Pharrell Williams' Neptunes; McDonald's launched the 2003 campaign, its first global one, after posting its first-ever quarterly loss in late 2002.
Q 13A 1992 settlement gave Energizer sole rights to a drumming battery bunny in which two countries?
United States and Canada
Q 21The Green Giant began in the 1920s as the brand for which vegetable?
Large peas
The Minnesota Valley Canning Company of Le Sueur first used 'Green Giant' in the 1920s for a variety of unusually large peas, with a giant on the label; it took the name for the whole firm in 1950.
Q 22What is the name of the Jolly Green Giant's young apprentice?
Little Green Sprout
Little Green Sprout joined the ads in the early 1970s as the Giant's apprentice; the Giant himself began as a scowling, threatening figure and only became 'Jolly' in a 1935 rebranding.
Q 23What does the Kool-Aid Man shout after bursting through a wall?
Oh, yeah!
United States and Canada went to Energizer under a confidential 1992 settlement, which left an older rival's pink rabbit with the rest of the world; the two firms were back in court over the split in 2016.
Q 14What does the Energizer Bunny wear on its feet?
Blue and black striped flip-flops
Blue and black striped flip-flops and sunglasses have stayed with the pink drumming rabbit since his debut; they even survived his 2016 redesign, when a slimmer Bunny walked a New York Fashion Week runway.
Q 15What is the Pillsbury Doughboy's proper name?
Poppin' Fresh
Poppin' Fresh dates from 1965, when ad man Rudy Perz was working with Pillsbury's canned dough in his own kitchen and the idea arose of a mascot who pops out of the can; the name nods to the dough's freshness.
Q 16What does the Doughboy do when a finger pokes his belly?
Giggles
The Doughboy giggles 'Hoo hoo!' when poked; the first stop-motion puppet cost $16,000, came with five bodies and 15 heads, and needed 24 separate shots for every second on screen.
Q 17Who was the first voice of the Pillsbury Doughboy, for 21 years?
Paul Frees
Paul Frees, the voice of Boris Badenov in Rocky and Bullwinkle, beat more than 50 actors to the part, Paul Winchell among them, and kept it from 1965 until his death in 1986.
Q 18What is the Michelin Man's official name?
Bibendum
Bibendum comes from 'Nunc est bibendum' ('now is the time to drink'), the Latin toast on a rejected beer-poster sketch that the Michelin brothers had the artist O'Galop rework around their mascot in 1898.
Q 19What sight at an 1894 Lyon fair inspired the Michelin Man?
Stacked tires
Stacked tires at the Lyon fair struck Édouard Michelin as a man without arms; four years later his brother André had the cartoonist O'Galop turn the idea into the company's poster figure.
Q 20What is Mr. Clean's first name, chosen in a 1962 contest?
Veritably
Veritably won a 1962 'Give Mr. Clean a First Name' promotion; the character had made his TV debut in 1958, played in live action by actor House Peters Jr.
'Oh, yeah!' is the Kool-Aid Man's catchphrase, bellowed after he smashes through a wall when thirsty kids shout 'Hey, Kool-Aid!'
Q 24What inspired the smiling pitcher face that became the Kool-Aid Man in 1954?
A child drawing on a frosted window
A child drawing on a frosted window gave art director Marvin Potts the idea: he watched his young son trace smiley faces on the glass, then put one on a pitcher he called the Pitcher Man.
Q 25What gave an ad agency the idea for the Aflac Duck?
The sound of the company's name
The sound of the company's name was the spark: the agency was hunting for a way to make people remember 'Aflac' when someone noticed that, said aloud, it resembles a duck's quack.
Q 26What were the three Budweiser Frogs named?
Bud, Weis, Er
The frogs croaked 'Bud', 'Weis' and 'Er' in turn to spell Budweiser; the spot debuted during Super Bowl XXIX in January 1995 and later spawned the rival lizards Frank and Louie.
Q 27Which future Pirates of the Caribbean director shot the first Budweiser Frogs ad?
Gore Verbinski
Gore Verbinski, who later directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, shot the 1995 Budweiser Frogs spot before making his feature debut with Mouse Hunt in 1997.
Q 28Budweiser's 'Whassup?' ads were based on a short film with what title?
True
'True' was Charles Stone III's short film of himself and his childhood friends greeting each other with 'Whassup?'; a Chicago ad man who saw it took the idea to Budweiser, and Stone directed the commercials.
Q 29The first 'Whassup?' spot aired in December 1999 during which broadcast?
Monday Night Football
The first 'Whassup?' spot ran on 20 December 1999 during Monday Night Football; it aired again during Super Bowl XXXIV and took the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2000.
Q 30The Budweiser Clydesdales were first shown to the public in 1933 to celebrate what?
The repeal of Prohibition
August Busch Jr. presented the hitch to his father on 7 April 1933 to mark the repeal of Prohibition, the day beer became legal again; it carried the first case from the St. Louis brewery.