You've Probably Seen This Marketing Quizmaster's Work on TV

Most of us grew up hearing fairy tales at bedtime and watching cartoons on TV. Jack Waley-Cohen’s childhood looked a little different. “My mum was obsessed with quizzes, and she would often not read our stories and would just ask us quiz questions and trivia questions,” recalled Whaley-Cohen, the co-founder and COO of location marketing firm what3words. “When we’d get home from school, we wouldn't watch kids TV because she'd be wanting to watch TV quiz shows.” Her passion became his, and eventually led to a side hustle: Waley-Cohen founded QuizQuizQuiz in 2003, which has grown into one of the world’s top quiz and trivia companies. Getting there required the usual ingredients: a bit of luck and some good friends. Shortly after arriving at the University of Oxford, Waley-Cohen befriended some classmates who had taken part in University Challenge, a British television quiz show. Together, they revived the Oxford University Quiz Society and continued traveling to London and Manchester for quiz show auditions. “I even took part in a quiz show midweek when I had a university exam on a Monday and a Friday, just because why not?” he said with a shrug. “My mum definitely approved.” After graduation, he went to work for Deutsche Bank in London, where annual corporate quiz nights are common. To get involved, Waley-Cohen found the bank’s events person and made himself indispensable: “The lady didn’t like running [quiz nights] because she liked writing the questions, but didn’t want to stand up and present them.” Once he got the hang of working a crowd, he expanded to pub quizzes, then approached other companies to help with their quiz nights, too. As QuizQuizQuiz gained more clients, he began getting requests from television shows including Only Connect, where Waley-Cohen had been a contestant during its first season. For the last 10 years, he’s been a writer for the series, now in its 20th season, and describes the gig as “good fun”—that happens to have a weekly audience of 33 million. Even with that success, Waley-Cohen keeps the writing and presenting of quizzes as his “professional hobby” limited to his spare time, mainly evenings and weekends. As for how he comes up with questions, it’s about “spotting something curious and packaging it in a fun and interesting way,” he explained. For instance: Which famous brand only follows 11 people on X (formerly Twitter), specifically six men named Herb and the five members of the Spice Girls? You don’t have to be a social media marketer to know the answer if you’ve seen a KFC commercial about its proprietary 11 herbs and spices recipe. Increasingly, Waley-Cohen has also been using artificial intelligence tools for inspiration. “They make a lot of stuff up and get facts wrong, but they’re quite good for brainstorming,” he acknowledged. “Like, I look for words that have an A as every other letter, and the tool pumps out some things which are wrong, but also things which generate other ideas.” As you can tell, Waley-Cohen doesn’t expect his audience to have memorized the encyclopedia. “It’s not fun when you’ve got a room full of people who are all scratching their heads,” he said. Instead, his technique is to craft facts into riddles, with multiple clues pointing to the same answer that can be solved by anyone from CEOs to warehouse workers. “Even people who aren’t classically intelligent can be very, very good at puzzle solving,” he explained. “Quizzes aren’t exams—they should be like a fun brain exercise.” Off the Clock chronicles the hobbies, sports, and side hustles of people in the advertising and marketing industries. To nominate someone, email eva.kis@adweek.com.

Off the Clock

You've Probably Seen This Marketing Quizmaster's Work on TV

What3words COO Jack Waley-Cohen was born into the quiz life

Eva Kis

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