Experiment
- Brand
- Trivial Pursuit
- Year
- 2009
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Quiz & Trivia
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Tribal Worldwide
Objective
Trivial Pursuit had a reputation as a game for know-it-alls, and Hasbro needed to shake that off as it launched Trivial Pursuit Team Edition. Tribal DDB London built a global stunt to reframe the brand around teams rather than individual brilliance, turning trivia into a public tally of "Who's Smarter Than Who?" that felt like a group sport anyone could join.
Solution
Players land on trivialpursuitexperiment.com and pick a side — man or woman in season one, under-30 or over-30 in season two — then drop straight into a scrolling feed of Trivial Pursuit questions. They choose which category to answer in, get 20 seconds per question, and only correct answers add to their team's tally; a wrong guess costs nothing. After each question, a short YouTube clip plays: answer right and it roasts the rival team, answer wrong and the joke turns on your own. A live scoreboard tracks both teams' combined totals in real time, so every answer reads as a small contribution to a running global battle, and players keep coming back to push their side's number higher.
Results
From launch in October 2009 through the season's close, players asked and answered more than 15 million questions. Turnout was strong enough that Hasbro pushed the finish line from December 31, 2009 to February 22, 2010. The first season ended in a near-dead heat, with women edging out men 4,088,139 to 4,077,596 correct answers.
- 1
The player lands on trivialpursuitexperiment.com, a standalone site built around a single global standoff, and declares an identity to join one of two sides: gender in the first season, generation (under 30 versus 30 and over) in the second, dubbed "Battle of the Generations".
- 2
The player picks a question category from the standard Trivial Pursuit set — arts and literature, sports and leisure, science and nature, geography, history, entertainment — favoring whichever category they expect to win.
- 3
A question appears with a 20-second countdown, tight enough to discourage looking up the answer online.
- 4
Correct answers add a point to the player's team; wrong answers cost nothing, so a player can only help their side or stay neutral, never hurt it.
- 5
After each answer, the player can watch a short YouTube-sourced fail clip: winning shows a blooper from the rival team, losing shows one from their own.
- 6
A running scoreboard shows the two teams' total correct answers, and the player can keep answering indefinitely, each correct answer adding another point.
- 7
The season ends with one side declared winner by total correct answers, and the only prize is bragging rights — the claim to being the smarter team.
