Guess the Slogan
An advertising line with the brand removed wherever there was one, because Have a break, have a Kit Kat is a fine slogan and a useless question. What remains is the part that had to work on its own.
50 lines across 27 sectors, from 1888 to 2016. Fast food and cars are the largest blocks at five each, then technology at four, and then a long tail through beer, confectionery, banking, delivery, batteries and tourism.
Name the brand behind an advertising line.
Play Guess the SloganDating a line by how it talks
Advertising language moves in decades. Pre-war lines are declarative and slightly formal, often describing a product benefit in plain terms. The 1950s and 1960s bring wit and understatement, particularly the American agency work. The 1980s and early 1990s are the imperative era — two or three words, a verb, and total confidence. After about 2000 the mode shifts to abstract values rather than product claims, and the lines get vaguer as a result.
Spelling and idiom split the Atlantic. A line using the word favourite or the phrasing of a British ad is one of about a dozen entries here. American lines lean on rhythm and repetition; British ones lean on irony.
Sector is often audible in the verb. Eat, taste and melt belong to food. Do, go and think belong to technology and sportswear. A line built around the words worth, deserve or best is grooming, cosmetics or a car.
The clue ladder
Three clues at a rung each. Sector first, which cuts 50 answers to somewhere between one and five. Then the year the line started running — not the year the company was founded, which is a distinction the file is careful about. Then a fact about the brand, written so it identifies without naming: an Oregon company named after a Greek goddess of victory, or a razor company whose entire business model was giving away the handle.
The era clue is the most useful of the three and the cheapest way out of a stuck round, because a line from 1911 and a line from 2013 have almost nothing in common.
How the list was kept honest
Two rules. If the attribution was not certain, the line was dropped — plenty of famous slogans get reassigned over time to whichever brand in the category is biggest, and a quiz that teaches the wrong one is worse than a shorter quiz. And nothing in the file contains the brand's own name.
A few entries carry a decade rather than a year, because the campaign ramped up rather than launched. Naming brands and quoting their slogans in a quiz is nominative use, and no logos or artwork appear anywhere in this game.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380 and 240, and it works offline. The guess list is every brand in the file, which is 50 names — small enough that reading the list is a genuine tactic when a line feels familiar but will not resolve.