From magazines to Buzzfeed: Personality tests for media
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For the general audience member, personality quizzes are a fun distraction in their day to day. Whether we care to admit it or not, they work because they’re a bridge between our favourite subjects: ourselves and one of our interests.
When you read or watch Harry Potter you automatically sort yourself into a house. If you follow sports you gravitate to supporting a particular team or a particular player. Pretty much any movie or TV show you enjoy will typically be because you see something of yourself in one of the characters.
Creating your own branded personality tests as a media group is a great way to fast track those connections with your audience. It’s a tried and tested audience engagement technique with a foundational proving ground in women’s magazines in the mid-20th century. The great news? It’s been evolving with technology ever since.
The evolution of personality tests in media
We’ll bet you a Coke that you’ve taken a personality test called “Which Friends character are you?” or something similar during the golden age of Buzzfeed. (And if you didn’t, your older siblings or your parents definitely have.)
They’re just an irresistible part of modern media, but do you realise what a long history the publishing and entertainment industries have with personality tests?
A brief history: How magazines popularised personality tests
Most people will have heard of a Cosmo quiz, but before the best selling women’s magazine of all time became synonymous with personality quizzes in media, there was a quiz in The Girl Friend – a pulp publication in the 1950s for young women – titled “What Are You Best Fitted For: Love or a Career?”
It’s pretty rough to a modern audience, both as an either-or concept, and in the content of some of the questions, but it took the form of multiple choice answers resulting in being “fitted for” either a career or marriage.
In 1966, the classic Cosmo personality quizzes hit the glossy pages. Cosmo writers were even consulting with subject matter experts like psychologists to construct the questions and answers, and the results proved a huge hit with their readership.
The format was aped across publications and different demographics, and personality quizzes in the publishing and entertainment industries were established.
The digital shift: Personality quizzes in the age of social media
Magazines and other publications diversified into online forms in the early 2000s, as have TV channels and radio stations. Coupled with social media’s rise, new and more interactive methods were called for to hook audiences…
The personality test would also migrate online to answer this call.
Though there were precursors, Buzzfeed launched in 2006, and over the years, became the biggest place for online personality tests, to the point that online personality tests based around culture and trivia are known as Buzzfeed style quizzes.
No pop culture subject was out of bounds to form a personality quiz around, and no marketing calendar occasion couldn’t be adapted to its format – whether a Christmas personality quiz to tap into the festive season, or a “Which horror movie monster do you secretly agree with?” sort of thing to capitalise on Halloween. It became an incredibly popular medium – and highly shareable on social media, massively boosting Buzzfeed’s revenue.
It’s an approach that was, and still is aped successfully by numerous other publications and media outlets on their websites.
Why personality tests work so well for media engagement
We understand why they work.
People enjoy self-discovery, particularly in ways that connect to their interests, but what’s in it for you as publisher, media house, or advertisers?
Increasing engagement time and user interaction
You ultimately want to keep people on your site for as long as possible, because this keeps users in your environment, and in your advertising space.
If you can deliver a fun experience around the area of interest you cover, this will also contribute to keeping your audience returning over time. If you’re using your personality quiz for marketing, this is an incredibly valuable metric to be able to account for.
Data collection and audience insights
The other great thing about personality tests, particularly when built on enterprise-grade personality test makers like Drimify, is that they generate a lot of user data which at scale, delivers great audience insights.
Every user action on a question and answer game like a personality test generates a data point, and if you’re smart and tactical with how you build your personality quizzes, you can learn a lot about your audience and how they relate to the subject you cover.
By assessing metrics like engagement rate and completion rate, over time and multiple personality tests, you can see the sort of content that’s having the biggest impact on your audience and optimise your personality quiz strategy.
You can also include data collection forms either before or after your personality test, so you can use them to collect demographic data, and boost your marketing newsletter emailing lists.
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