What’s a great marketing idea? Create a Jeopardy! experience

The interactive quiz is a powerful digital communications tool for customer experience activations (CX), internal employee experience campaigns (EX), or even for educational purposes.

Why? Because people love to participate in fun quizzes. It’s built into our culture. Game shows, social media, even conversations and making friends, are about asking and answering questions on fun topics.

For businesses, this is a hook, or a lure, almost as effective as a prize in itself for getting people to play their marketing games. There’s an undeniable rush about being able to answer a difficult trivia question or solve a riddle without having to resort to Google.

This engagement in the very format allows businesses to filter branded messaging into and around their interactive quizzes, and enables them to more effectively collect data through forms, get participants to opt-in to email marketing, and to visit their strategic web pages through end screen call to action buttons (CTAs).

In this article, we’ll talk about how to make your own interactive quiz to achieve your own communications goals, but we’re not concerned with your garden variety question and answer game today. We’re specifically talking about making your very own branded version of Jeopardy.

And to be clear, we’re not talking about a homemade, substitute teacher level situation on slides. We’re talking about a digital tool made using an enterprise-grade Jeopardy template that will be fit for tackling real business challenges.

Understanding the Jeopardy experience as a quiz format

You’ve likely heard of Jeopardy even if you’re not familiar with the rules.

It’s an American quiz show that first aired in 1964, and it basically swapped the positions of the questions and the answers. Contestants are presented with clues phrased as answers, and must provide the question to earn points.

For example, instead of asking: “Which explorer was the first person to reach the South Pole in 1911?” with the answer being of course, Roald Amundsen, the clue would be: “He discovered the North Pole in 1911,” and a successful contestant would respond: “Who is Roald Amundsen?”

Why is the game show Jeopardy Called “Jeopardy?”

Because it’s a cool word.

Sincerely, that’s why.

It was pitched as “What’s the Question?” but executives at NBC were underwhelmed, and described it as lacking “jeopardies.” This kickstarted Merv Griffin’s imagination and the rest is history.

How a Jeopardy quiz drives user engagement

There are two major factors as to why Jeopardy quiz games can be a great asset for businesses looking to engage users:

• They’re a slight variation on the popular quiz format: This means that participants get the fun of doing a quiz, but there’s an extra twist and an extra challenge as they’re having to reverse it. Human beings crave interaction and challenge, and the Jeopardy format works on both fronts.
• Online Jeopardy can deliver a major nostalgia hit: It’s also a cultural touchstone as a TV show. The very format is intriguing and evocative of memories for a lot of people, and even if people haven’t watched it they’ve seen it referenced, making it very familiar.

For these reasons, people are more likely to engage in your branded version of an online Jeopardy game than they might for a more straight-forward interactive quiz.

With or without a prize, playing Jeopardy has an extra novelty factor about it. People quite literally buy board game versions of popular quiz shows to just play with their families or on game nights – where there are likely zero prizes up for grabs, just playing for the love of the game and bragging rights.

Creating your own Jeopardy marketing game

The good news is, making a professional looking online quiz in this style is easier than ever before.

This isn’t a hokey Powerpoint situation that can only work at a live event – this will be a digital tool that can work like a real mobile marketing game, giving you useful data for every user action, ideal for all sorts of communications activations.

Choose an enterprise-grade Jeopardy game maker

The Drimify gamification platform’s online quiz builder comes with a highly versatile template that you can use to achieve all sorts of quiz configurations, including the Jeopardy format, as well as all the forms and extra screens you’ll need to deliver your branded messaging and strategic CTAs.

Fundamentally, the online Jeopardy game maker – or online quiz creator – you choose needs to offer fully customisable options for your question and answer formats, the ability to brand the background and logo, and further configuration options to tailor your game to your branded story.

Tailor your Jeopardy Quiz to your target audience

Remember, this is going to be slightly harder than your typical quiz. There’s an extra bit of mental gymnastics involved to work backwards from the answer to the question, so you probably want to go a little easier on the difficulty level than you normally would.

The way to do it most effectively is to provide the answer/ clue, and place that in the question field, then provide four possible questions.

To go back to our earlier example: “He discovered the North Pole in 1911,” you could provide the following options:

• Who is Indiana Jones?
• Who is Roald Amundsen?
• Who is Edmund Hilary?
• Who is Frederick Albert Cook?

The other thing to do is to make sure it’s based on categories that are in your audience’s field of interest(s). Tailor the categories to their generation, and the content of the questions to the eras they’re likely to know.

For example, a football category in a Jeopardy format targeting gen Z focused on the 1980s isn’t going to be great.

Double Jeopardy, triple Jeopardy, and beyond…

It’s an interactive quiz format, but backwards, and so very, very effective, whether you’re delivering a fun experience for your employees, such as to help structure a Christmas party, or for marketing activations to connect with external audiences – it would be especially on-theme if it was some sort of retro promotion, or involved nostalgia. Consider also the possibility to use a custom Jeopardy game to teach students about 21st century history…

If you’re using the Drimify quiz creator, you could also use an experience builder like the Dynamic Path™ to create a more complete Jeopardy experience, upping the difficulty from round to round, and having sections dedicated to specific categories. This approach also allows you to weight the scoring, so the harder rounds – your Double Jeopardy and Triple Jeopardy – deliver more points (just like in the real thing).

It’s ideal to inject a bit of variety to your interactive marketing, or as the basis for an entire comms activation.

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