So much of what we do on Jeopardy!'s social channels is devoted to bringing the notable and/or humorous moments of gameplay from Jeopardy! directly to our fans' feeds. But a feed of wall-to-wall videos can get monotonous. So we like to break it up with content that fans might not totally expect — and a lot of the time, that content is our special brand of humor.
In this instance, we combined two things we love into one glorious meme: Ken Jennings, our host, the G.O.A.T. of Jeopardy! and a pretty funny guy all by himself, and the ubiqitous, self-serious yet very ironically funny "Success" posters that any kid from the 90s would immediately recognize.
Videos for social can take huge amounts of time, pull in lots of people and often require money, so each week we sit down and brainstorm fun ideas that don't require video — whether that's hopping onto some zeitgeist-y trend that's bubbling on TikTok or just crafting some interesting meme at the intersection of our show and pop culture.
The idea of combining Ken Jennings with the "Success" poster was a totally organic outcome of one of these brainstorm sessions. It's also the perfect combo: Ken is, himself, the embodiment of the Success poster, having gone from an anonymous software engineer to a 74-game Jeopardy! winner, the host of the most iconic quiz show on television as well as a successful author and podcaster.
So we mashed the two together, combining the classic poster and one of our official shots of Ken for the show, wrote some spiffy copy and sent it out into the world.
This post crushed it with Jeopardy! fans, to the tune of an engagement rate that was 68% better than our already incredibly high rolling average, and impressions that beat our average by 58%. We recieved a ton of requests that we turn the poster into merch (fans wanted to hang it in their offices!) and a number of our team now have our own versions hanging next to our desks. Rumor has it that Ken, the 🐐, has his own copy somewhere...
