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 03Nike's Swoosh is widely said to echo what?
The wings of a Greek goddess
The wings of a Greek goddess is the usual reading, since Nike is the winged goddess of victory; designer Carolyn Davidson's actual brief was simply a stripe that suggested movement.
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 07Why did Apple's '1984' ad first air in Idaho on December 31, 1983?
For awards
For awards: the ad ran on KMVT in Twin Falls at the last break before midnight so it would qualify for the coming awards season, weeks before the Super Bowl airing that made it famous.
Q 08Advertising Age named which line the best advertising slogan of the 20th century?
A Diamond Is Forever
A Diamond Is Forever was coined in the late 1940s by copywriter Frances Gerety of N. W. Ayer for De Beers, and it helped make the diamond ring the expected symbol of an engagement.
Q 09Which cigarette brand was sold as a mild smoke for women before a 1950s campaign remade it as rugged?
Marlboro
Marlboro was pitched to women as 'Mild as May'; Leo Burnett's cowboys reversed that because filter cigarettes were seen as feminine, and sales rose 300% in two years.
Q 10Clara Peller demanded 'Where's the beef?' in a 1984 ad for which fast-food chain?
Wendy's
Wendy's dropped Clara Peller in 1985 after she told a Prego sauce ad 'I found it'; Walter Mondale had borrowed her line to mock rival Gary Hart in the 1984 Democratic primaries.
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 12The Michelin Man's first poster, in 1898, carried the Latin line 'Nunc est bibendum', meaning what?
Now is the time to drink
Now is the time to drink: he raises a goblet of nails and broken glass to show that Michelin tyres 'drink up' obstacles, and in those days he also smoked a cigar.
Q 13What are E. Jerome McCarthy's 4 Ps, set out in 1960?
Q 21Haddon Sundblom is best known for painting which figure in Coca-Cola advertisements from 1931?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus: Sundblom's jolly Santa first appeared in Coca-Cola ads in 1931, but he did not invent the red suit, which artists had been painting for decades before.
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 was built in by designer Lindon Leader in 1994: he blended two typefaces, Univers and Futura, until the gap between the letters formed it naturally.
Q 23How much did a 30-second commercial cost at the first Super Bowl in 1967?
About $40,000
Product, price, place, promotion
Product, price, place, promotion are the 4 Ps of McCarthy's 1960 textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, which sorted the long ingredient checklists marketers then used under four headings.
Q 14Which 'father of modern marketing' wrote the 1967 textbook Marketing Management?
Philip Kotler
Philip Kotler wrote Marketing Management in 1967; in 1971 he and Gerald Zaltman coined the term 'social marketing' for using the same tools to change behaviour for the public good.
Q 15Which company aired the first official TV commercial, a ticking clock face shown before a 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers game?
Bulova
Bulova paid no more than $9 for the spot on New York's WNBT, which ran on July 1, 1941, the first day commercial advertising was allowed on American television.
Q 16Which company's 'You Will' campaign bought the 1994 HotWired banner widely called the web's first banner ad?
AT&T
AT&T's banner asked whether you had ever clicked your mouse right here, and promised 'You will'; HotWired launched with banners from several sponsors, but this is the one remembered as the first.
Q 17What was the click-through rate on the 1994 HotWired banner ad widely called the web's first?
About 44%
About 44% of the people who saw the banner clicked it during its first four months online; today's display ads draw clicks from a small fraction of one percent of viewers.
Q 18Under what name did Coca-Cola's original formula return in July 1985, 79 days after New Coke replaced it?
Coca-Cola Classic
Coca-Cola Classic went on sale after calls to the company's hotline reached 1,500 a day; accused of staging the whole affair, president Donald Keough said, 'We are not that dumb, and we are 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 20How did Pepsi mark New Coke's launch in April 1985?
Gave staff the day off
Gave staff the day off: Pepsi executive Roger Enrico declared a company holiday and ran newspaper ads proclaiming victory in the cola wars.
About $40,000: reports run from $37,500 to $42,500 for the 1967 game, which CBS and NBC both televised; by 2023 a 30-second slot cost about $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 won with 'Puppy Love', in which the horses run out to bring back an adopted puppy and their owner decides to keep it; it was the brand's second straight Ad Meter win.
Q 25Which agency made Volkswagen's 1959 'Think Small', Advertising Age's campaign of the century?
Doyle Dane Bernbach
Doyle Dane Bernbach's art director Helmut Krone and copywriter Julian Koenig set a small Beetle against a bare background; Krone designed the 'Lemon' ad at the same time.
Q 26Tony the Tiger debuted in 1952 as the mascot for which cereal?
Frosted Flakes
Frosted Flakes' Tony was voiced for five decades by Thurl Ravenscroft, who also sang 'You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch' but went uncredited, so many assumed Boris Karloff had sung it.
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: English actor Jake Wood, known at home for EastEnders, gives the Gecko his London accent; earlier ads had used other voices, including Frasier star Kelsey Grammer.
Q 29What does the marketing acronym AIDA stand for?
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action is usually credited to adman E. St. Elmo Lewis, whose early version is said to have had three steps, with 'get action' added later.
Q 30Google Ads launched in October 2000 under what name?
AdWords
AdWords launched in October 2000 with about 350 advertisers; pay-per-click pricing only arrived with AdWords Select in 2002, and a 2018 rename made it Google Ads.