What started as a silly idea, a pub-style quiz all about marketing, has grown into a fundraising phenomenon, raising over £500,000 for charity. Packed with CMOs, catchy 90s hits, and high-stakes trivia, the MASSIVE Marketing Quiz proves that great fun and meaningful impact can go hand in hand, writes Joel Barnett, Founder and CEO, Fortune Hill.

Three years ago, we came up with a very silly idea: wouldn’t it be fun to have a pub-style quiz that was all about marketing?! I couldn’t possibly have imagined we’d raise over £500,000 for charities and we’d get many of the folks on the Top 100 lists to sing (well, technically shout and scream) the lyrics to the Proclaimers hit I’m Gonna Be (500 miles).

In the first year, we managed to convince LinkedIn to allow us to use their events space, and Russell Parsons to be our host, and we got about 70 of our favourite CMOs together to play. We gave the quiz a festive twist and asked questions like “In the famous Coca-Cola Christmas ad, which first aired in 1995, how many times are the lyrics ‘Holidays are Coming’ repeated before the first verse kicks in?”… and other equally high-brow trivia. 

Everyone who came said it was great fun and suggested we do it again the following year (we’d always assumed it would be a one-off). So, the following year we teamed up with Snap and The Marketing Academy to host the 2nd annual MASSIVE Marketing Quiz: the 90s edition. This time we had a lot more CMOs in the room. Last week, we hosted the Iconic Brands edition of the MASSIVE Marketing Quiz, again at Snapchat’s gorgeous event space in Farringdon. It was bigger and better by far than in previous years. We ended up turning people away at the door because we had assumed a drop-out rate of 30% - which is standard for events – but it seems that hardly anyone wanted to miss this one!  

We’ve raised nearly £250,000 for Under One Sky to help people living on our cities’ streets, and The Marketing Academy Foundation to give young people the opportunity to access this wonderful profession that we are all so privileged to be in.

And here are a few things the experience taught us about marketing:

  • Focus first on the quality of the product. If the product/service you provide is consistently excellent (in our case the quiz and the feel-good-vibes), then creating awareness and followship based on advocacy becomes much easier.
  • Marketing can be a force for good. We have united the marketing leadership community behind a fundraising goal, and they have risen gloriously to the challenge.
  • Sheer bloody-minded relentless determination can move mountains (or in this case, change lives).
  • No other profession has a community as strong as the marketing community. The room was full of genuine, lovely people who are warm and welcoming and value connection.
  • Most CMOs are terrible singers! But they’re prepared to embarrass themselves in front of their peers for charity.

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