Trivial Pursuit Hotel was an activation to build an awareness of Trivial Pursuit board game in Russia. It was a pop-up hotel, where the quality of people’s stay depended on how well they answered questions from the board game. Hotel guests literally lived in the Trivial Pursuit board game, experiencing its ups and downs.

The Trivial Pursuit game was launched in Russia over 5 years ago, but despite media support, the brand kept ranking low in knowledge and sales. Just 5% of parents with children aged 6–12 knew about the Trivial Pursuit game. In the overall range of Hasbro board games, Trivial Pursuit ranked 22nd, while maintaining 11th – 12th place in European countries (e.g. Great Britain and France).

Our objectives were:

1) Increase Trivial Pursuit brand awareness by 15% *

2) Stimulate sales growth: +40% *

*compared to the same period in 2018

We opened a world-first hotel that accepts knowledge as a payment. The quality of your stay there depended on your ability to answer general knowledge questions from the Trivial Pursuit board game. For instance: if you knew Napoleon’s height in cm - you slept in a king size bed. If not - there was only a folding bed for you. The same principle worked for every?hing: from hotel transfer and a swimming pool - to your food and the size of your TV. Even to book a stay on the hotel's website you had to answer questions, so even if you weren’t lucky enough to go there, you’d learned that Trivial Pursuit is a quiz game

The core audience were young active families with children aged 6–12 as the main consumers of board games. Our secondary audience was youngsters aged 18 to 25 (buying games to play with friends).

One of the main barriers for people choosing board games was that it is tough for consumers to get an idea of gameplay without unboxing and trying the game; but without that, consumers are reluctant to make a choice. This is especially true for Trivial Pursuit, as the game’s name hadn’t been translated into Russian and didn’t sound too clear. So we had to both increase brand knowledge and get the audience immersed into the key aspects of gameplay, so that consumers would know exactly what experience and emotions the game was going to bring.

Working closely with one of Russia's best quest-production companies, we rebuilt a small boutique hotel located about 45 kilometers outside of Moscow on the premises of the four-star Svezhy Veter Country Hotel complex. We filled it with mechanisms, cameras and microphones - so it could be operated remotely, launched an online promo video and opened the hotel’s website for bookings. There was also a PR part - Russian celebrities visited the hotel: Natalia Rudova and Agatha Priluchnaya with her son.

We knew we couldn’t accommodate all applicants, so we launched a contest: only people who answered Trivial Pursuit game questions on the hotel's website could win their stay. This is how every website visitor learned the Trivial Pursuit gameplay and understood that it is a quiz game.

The website was available for bookings from 18.03.19 to 05.05.19

Hotel opened its doors for winners on 29.05.19 and worked until 14.06.19

There were 36 hotel lucky guests and more than 350 000 hotel website visitors.

Users were so interested to try the Trivial Pursuit gameplay that if we were to approve all applications, the hotel would have been booked for 19 years and 2 months.

500+ publications in media worldwide

Earned media: 95 mln $

Media reach: 1,48 bln

The brand knowledge increased by 37% (vs 15% planned)

The engaging promotion mechanics led to a spike of interest in the brand: the number of Trivial Pursuit search queries increased 4 times

Our business indicators beat all records:

Brand sales in Russia: +117% (vs. 40% planned)

The brand rose in the board game portfolio from place 22 to 15 by sales value

Brand sales in France: +10%

Brand sales in Germany: +106%