Casual-dining chains and independent bar-and-grill concepts are finding that trivia nights are not exactly trivial.


Whether hosted live or run on a digital network, using fancy buzzers or old-fashioned pen and paper, trivia nights help to drive traffic and foster friendly competition — often resulting in diners lingering a little while longer at the restaurant, operators say.


Answering a need


For more than a year, Hooters has tried to drive traffic with a digital trivia platform guests can play using the Playmaker handheld device. Popular titles include the “Countdown” game for general trivia, “Sports IQ” and fan favorite “Are You Smarter Than a Hooters Girl?”


“We feel like it’s helped with frequency,” said Diana Switzer, division sales manager for the Northern division of Hooters of America. “Just having it available is a positive — not necessarily because people that come in for trivia are a core group, but people that do are coming in two or three times a week to play along with a Playmaker.”


Having trivia also helps Hooters build up its average check, Switzer said.


“We’ve figured that the average hosted-trivia player spends about $5 more than a normal guest visit,” she said. “We’re normally at an average check between $15 to $16, and trivia players are at around $21. Most come in groups of three or four, and they definitely stay longer.”


Trivia customers also engage with other players in the restaurants, which creates a rapport that helps influence repeat traffic, Switzer said.


“When you go to a place and feel comfortable because you know the staff and other customers, it’s a place you want to go back to,” she said. “You see the guy’s name at the table next to you, you start answering some questions, and it starts a dialogue.”


Franchised and company-owned units of Beef ‘O’ Brady’s and Buffalo Wild Wings also use the Playmaker platform.


Phoning it in


Hooters tries to build big events around trivia, such as competitions in which every one of each location’s 15 Playmakers is in use, Switzer said. In those cases, Hooters promotes the mobile version of the Playmaker, available for free as a smart-phone app.


“Maybe we could do a better job of publicizing the availability of the app,” she said, but most players prefer the handheld Playmaker because the mobile app “definitely eats up a lot of battery.”


Other trivia systems turn customers’ cell phones into the buzzers that allow them to play along to trivia on the screen, but they allow users to answer without a smart-phone app via simple text messaging. Bar and nightclub venues like Fifty Brews Sports Bar and Grill in Orlando, Fla.; Sidecar in Atlanta; and Diversey River Bowl in Chicago use The 3rd Degree platform.


No servers or bartenders are needed to host the trivia games run on the system, which updates automatically with new questions and keeps score for the players who text their answers to a specified number. Bars and restaurants using the system also can advertise their specials on a ticker scrolling along the bottom of the trivia screens.



The human touch


Sometimes, though, new mobile and digital trivia technology still requires a human element to keep people interested.


Hooters and trivia provider NTN Buzztime developed the custom “Are You Smarter Than a Hooters Girl?” game to be played with Playmaker handheld devices and TV screens in place of the hosted events. But the chain soon found that not every entertainment function needed to be ceded to the machines, Switzer said.


“We realized after we started that our customers didn’t like it when we started taking the Hooters Girl element out of the program,” Switzer said. 


The hosted-trivia version with a live Hooters Girl now runs each Tuesday in nearly all the Hooters locations in Switzer’s territory of Missouri and Illinois. Digital trivia enabled by the Playmaker runs on five screens at all times, she said.


And for the hosted games, “our girls are still there on the microphone running the show, but all the trivia is done on the screen through the system,” Switzer said. “It’s all scored digitally, so it’s cleaner, and it’s better for the guests in the restaurant that don’t want to be involved in the games.”


Chicago-based multiconcept operator Twilight Traffic Control also prefers to have live-hosted games at its upscale sports bar, Bull & Bear, but the company brings in ringers from outside. Bull & Bear just started its Trivia Tuesdays event in July and contracted with Chicago Trivia Guys, which hosts a trivia night every night of the week around the city.


Twilight principal Luke Stoioff said having a live host rather than a digital game with handheld controllers or mobile apps is like having a DJ on-site rather than running the restaurant’s music off an iPod.


“Having that human factor to control things depending on what’s going on is important,” he said. “The trivia host can read the crowd and be more hands-on, and he can slow things down and wrangle everyone together if they’re getting rowdy or losing focus.”


Trivia Tuesdays at Bull & Bear are aimed at the regulars from the local River North neighborhood and are meant to foster a comfortable break from the normal bar scene, Stoioff said. The restaurant’s many flat-screen high-definition TVs are used to post questions throughout the place, but the hosts handle everything else, including scorekeeping.


The return on Bull & Bear’s marketing investment is high for trivia, Stoioff added, falling back on his DJ-versus-iPod analogy.


“Just like I would rather have somebody in charge of music rather than deciding to burn a bunch of CDs myself, I’ve got these guys, and trivia is what they do,” he said. “They have all the bells and whistles, and they come up with all the questions. It’s the perfect industry for outsourcing.”


Contact Mark Brandau at mark.brandau@penton.com.