Recently, I compiled and led a live trivia contest for a group of folks I occasionally chat with in an online bulletin board. The effort was not exactly a raging success: As one contestant said afterward, “Well, nobody died.”
What is especially galling is that, had I applied a few basic rules from direct response marketing, I could have avoided a lot of heartache. What follow are some of the lessons that were brought home, as well as a sampling of the questions. The answers are at the end of the column.
Rule 1. Know your audience and sell to it, rather than assuming your offering will find a market.
Despite there being an online trivia game, the site we all met on is not a trivia site. It is a site in which people occasionally play trivia. They also post recipes, jokes and opinions. The hard-core trivia junkies enjoyed the live contest: The more casual players were less than impressed, and in hindsight I should have cut the following thornier questions, among others;
Who was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1982? (1)
In the Beatles’ song “When I’m 64,” what are the names of the grandchildren Paul McCartney imagines having on his knee? (2)
Rule 2. Enthusiasts make for lousy pre-market focus groups.
A test run consisting of people who absolutely love trivia is not an unbiased sample. Next time, I’m testing the questions with people who are lukewarm at trivia, as well as a few who find it only slightly more pleasurable than chewing on tinfoil. Doing so would have prevented me from asking, “In the board game Trivia Pursuit, which color represents the “Arts and Literature” category”. (3)
Rule 3. When you bung up a customer relationship, you’ve got to work doubly hard to repair it.
Midway through the merry little crash and burn session, when players were threatening open mutiny at the obscurity of the questions, I tried to hint at one answer by making a small joke – but by this point the audience didn’t care about small hints. The joke went over about as well as someone showing up at a car rental place and being told by the clerk that the bad news was there are no cars available. The good news was that the customer will surely save on mileage costs as a result.
Rule 4. Cut your losses
Even if marketers have a warehouse of unsold merchandise, when the first waves of efforts don’t pull in the orders, end that campaign and retool or find another channel. I should have chucked the last live round of questions, and sent them around via e-mail later to anyone who wanted them, even though that round included the following gems:
Who was the last English King to die in battle? (4)
Which was the only movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture that had “last” in its name? (5)
In June 1977, what solo artist sang “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” as his last publicly performed song? (6)
Rule 6. Know your audience.
The average age of this group is 55 or so, which explains why the “identify the song snippet from Radiohead” question was a bad idea, while “Who were the members of the original Rat Pack? (7)” was effortlessly hit out of the park by most teams, along with “What actor had his nose insured? (8)
Rule 7. Kill Your Darlings
The best copywriters don’t allow personal love of a particular campaign element to color whether the piece is effective. In the same vein, no matter how much I love the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” asking people to identify best actress winner Louise Fletcher was a bad idea. Based on the small photo I supplied, most people guessed Margaret Thatcher.
Rule 8. But don’t forget to learn from your successes, too.
The questions that worked best were either classic knowledge, or guessable if one knew something about the subject and could make a logical leap or two. If I ever run one of these things again, I’ll ask more along the lines of the following:
In WWI, what did soldiers call the space between opposing trenches? (9)
Who are the two richest women in England? (10)
What is the first book of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments)… alphabetically? (11)
Which President was the first to preside over all 50 states? (12)
Which athlete, among ESPN’s 100 Greatest of the 20th Century, weighed the most? (13)
The answers follow.
Answers:
(1) The personal computer (Yes, that was the “Person of the Year.”
(2) Vera, Chuck and Dave
(3) Brown
(4) Richard III
(5) The Last Emperor
(6) Elvis Presley
(7) I figured Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. would be gimmies, that several teams would get Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford would be referred to as “And that other guy.” The few teams that missed one missed Joey Bishop. Apologies to Cindy Adams.
(8) Jimmy Durante
(9) No Man’s Land
(10) Queen Elizabeth and “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling
(11) Acts of the Apostles.
(12) Dwight D. Eisenhower
(13) The racehorse Secretariat
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