SMA Quiz
Last week saw the first ever Scottish Marketing Quiz take place. Held in Arta in Glasgow, the evening was organised by the Scottish Marketing Association (SMA) and the Marketing Society of Scotland in, according to compere Kenny Harris of Headsurf, “an attempt to get the word ‘marketing’ into the same sentence as many times as possible.”
Over 70 marketers turned up to take part in four gruelling rounds of questions. Amongst the participating teams were the M8 Haters, Nova, Kelly’s Heroes and the inventively-titled Quiz-Team Aguilera. The first round, Brand Disasters, provided examples of disasters that occurred when companies attempted to launch brands overseas without changing the brand names. These included the catastrophic launch of the Ford Pinto into South America, as Ford was unaware that ‘Pinto’ translated as ‘tiny genitals.’
Round 2, Name That Brand, invited teams to identify brand names from straplines and pieces of music used in the ads themselves. In a particularly head-scratching round, bonus points were also awarded for naming the artists and song titles.
The first stage of round three displayed several headlines from The Drum, which had key words blanked-out. In true ‘Have I Got News for You’ fashion the competing teams were asked to fill in the missing words – leading to several very inventive new headlines from some of the teams.
“One of my personal favourites was ‘TBWA\Edinburgh closes after finding Scotland a bag of wank’” Harris declared.
The second part of the round displayed some, frankly alarming, photo-fit pictures consisting of several well-known industry figures who had to be identified. For the grand finale, teams had to create an advertising strapline, script or jingle for a product and present it to the room. In the end the Binge Drinkers were named top of the pile, taking home a small alcohol collection as well as the prestige of their victory. Consisting of staff and clients from Glasgow-based Nation1 as well as Jim Harding of Matchpoint, the team continued to celebrate, along with several of their opponents, into the night. Chairman Andy Jones was last spotted leaving Arta with around seven bottles of whisky under his arm.