On a recent Tuesday night at Longnecks Sports Grill in Wilder, patrons filtered into the dimly lit dining room. They ordered food and drinks as the clock neared 8 p.m. – the start time for a game of trivia.
Spenser Smith, who has hosted trivia for three years, set up in the back corner at a table outfitted with a laptop and sound equipment. He picked up his microphone and grabbed the crowd’s attention to explain the game rules.
Many of the players already knew the rules, though. They come every Tuesday.
Teams joined the game on their mobile devices and decided on a team name. Smith reviewed the team names with wry amusement as they appeared on his screen.
“I don’t even want to go over these yet if I don’t have to say them,” he told the crowd. “You annoy me every week,” Smith continued, referring to the sophomoric team names on his laptop screen.
If you’re going to a bar, restaurant or cafe in Northern Kentucky for a trivia night, chances are it’s hosted by Last Call Trivia, just like this one. The Northern Kentucky company has a firm grip on trivia nights locally, and its presence has spread to other cities around the country, including Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Louisville and Portland.
Last Call Trivia started locally in 2007. CEO and co-owner Adam Johnston started the business alongside creative director and co-owner Drew Turner.
The idea was sparked by happenstance. The duo knew they wanted to start a business together, but their sights were set on opening a bar. They were hanging out and playing trivia at a bar in Charleston, South Carolina, when the idea struck them.
“We just looked at each other, and were like, we can do this. And we can do it better than what’s out there,” Johnston said.
Opening a bar was suddenly moved to the back seat, and a trivia-game business became the new plan.
Brand built on curiosity
They began developing a business model and a game format. Not long after, they held a preview show in a bid to get clients. They found two clients at their first preview show, and shortly after, they inked a deal with an Applebee’s regional marketing manager, boosting their portfolio from zero to more than 10 locations.
At the start of the journey, Johnston was sweeping floors in a movie theater to make ends meet while the duo tried to make Last Call Trivia take off. Their strategy early on was to travel to metropolitan areas around the country to find interested venues and set them up with the hosts and trivia questions they needed to hold games. Johnston said this approach helped them form operating hubs, but juggling the taxing work of travel, sales, marketing and staffing as a two-man team proved difficult.
Those initial footprints still exist, said Johnston, but now the focus is on offering an optimal product that enhances revenue for businesses and keeps customers returning. They’re currently doing that with an online game interface that allows participating teams to read question on-screen and remotely submit their answers to the host. This concept was born out of the social-distancing requirements of the COVID pandemic.
The game itself is designed to be challenging, but not impossible, said Johnston. Questions from different categories and skill levels help equalize the playing field and encourage teams to work together to winnow their answer from a pool of collective knowledge.
“We purposely have fewer questions spread out over that two hours, so it gives people a chance to really talk and socialize,” said Brianna LeCompte, director of business development. “It’s kind of more focused on the actual conversations that the questions drive and encouraging people to kind of socialize and talk and get together rather than just a straight up quiz of, ‘How smart are you?’”
Trivia may seem, well, trivial, but Johnston said the trivial part of the game is whether you answer questions right or wrong; the rest of the experience – a consistent reason to go out with friends, conversations sparked by scattershot questions and the impact on business – is not so trivial, he said.
“Our core belief is that curiosity not only connects us to the things that ignite our passions, but also the people that matter to us most in our lives,” he said. “So we’re building a brand on curiosity.”
A catalyst for business
“One of the things that we tell clients is that, give us one night of the week, right, and you’ll never have to worry about it again,” said Johnston.
Johnston explained that the company uses data-driven insights to communicate the value that hosting trivia nights can have for a business. When working with a prospective customer, Last Call Trivia assesses the profile of the venue so they can see how other businesses that have a similar location, crowd demographic or offerings have fared working with the company.
They also provide venue-specific game trends to clients so they can see how many people are playing weekly. This allows them to compare how the presence of trivia in the venue correlates with sales, said Johnston.
“We’re playing the long game together. Not chasing something, not chasing a trend, but slowly building a show and getting people who are invested in coming back every week,” said Johnston.
Samantha Matthews, general manager at Wooden Cask Brewing Co. in Newport, said the brewery has been hosting trivia at their taprooms with Last Call Trivia for about seven years. In that span, she says they’ve built a base of regulars that they can count on returning nearly every week.
Matthews, who doubles as the event coordinator, said the trivia games are not only good for bringing customers in, but keeping people there for longer periods, which she says other events they host don’t match. “Once they’re in the door, it’s about the experience,” she said.
That experience, she said, is rounded out with quality beer, service and a friendly trivia host.
Side-hustling hosts
Adam Stone has been hosting games with Last Call Trivia for 10 years. He learned of the opportunity to host games from an online ad and took on the role to make some extra cash.
Stone is a gig worker who pulls from several baskets to make a living. He’s a musician, a freelance voice actor and, of course, a trivia host. He said his twice weekly shows are the closest thing to consistent structure that he has in his professional life.
As a musician, Stone had experience as an entertainer before ever hosting a game of trivia, which he thought would transfer well to game hosting. Last Call Trivia games are also designed to interweave songs between questions to allow people time to talk through an answer. Being a venue’s de facto DJ while hosting made him gravitate to the gig and is something he said he still cherishes about it.
Stone said hosting trivia has opened doors that he had never considered before. Early in his hosting days, he would often draw comments that he had a radio-ready voice. He realized after gaining several years of on-mic experience from hosting that he could monetize his voice in other ways. He’s done voiceover work for about five years now, he said, recording media like audio books and corporate training modules.
“After some years, I started thinking maybe I should look into that. I am also a musician. I work with live audio stuff all the time. I have my foot kind of in the door and some of that stuff already. So I kind of decided to give that a go,” Stone said about getting into voice over work.
Stone’s story bears similarities with Smith’s, the host from Longnecks. Smith works at Music Hall in Cincinnati full-time. Hosting trivia is what he calls his “fun gig.”
Smith said he earned a degree in acting from Northern Kentucky University. About three years ago, during the humdrum of COVID, he was looking for an outlet that would satisfy an urge to entertain, he said. He also found the opportunity to host Last Call Trivia through an online ad.
“I had not been on stage for two years at that point. I was just looking for something, anything, that would give me any kind of excitement,” said Smith.
He recently reached his third-year anniversary of hosting trivia. “It just filled that void for me of just having some kind of interaction with an audience,” said Smith. “Now, three years down the road, I would not want to stop doing this, because I love it a lot.”
A bond like no other
“The hosts connecting with the people at the venue is what brings them back. You kind of become another member of the family, another member of the friend group. You’re excited to see that person who’s going to be there hosting every Tuesday night,” said Johnston.
On that recent evening at Longnecks, the interpersonal connections formed between Smith and the audience were apparent. When asked how many of the teams present that night attend weekly, Smith responded eight.
Sitting in the room, it was clear that people felt comfortable with him and understood his humor. One team decided to prank Smith. Reading each team’s answer to a bonus question, Smith stopped and hesitated to read one team’s name. “Is this you? What’s your team name?” he asked while pointing his gaze at a team across the dining room.
“I don’t even know how to say this. Nope, I’m not saying it,” said Smith. The team in question laughed smugly. “They always love to either create the longest and/or worst name that I can’t pronounce, because they think it’s hilarious,” he said, as if justifying his refusal to read the team name.
Rituals popped up throughout the game like clockwork. When the question category was sports, everyone shouted “sports!” When every team failed to get an answer right, the host proclaimed an “anti-social” that everyone cheered their drinks to. People cheered their drinks again when everyone got a question correct, which the host declared a “social.”
Building a microcommunity with the people who play trivia is what Stone and Smith said drives them to continue hosting. Simultaneously, forming those loyal communities is what Johnston touts as the value Last Call Trivia can offer.
The relationships built through trivia have even gone to some extremes. Stone said he’s officiated multiple weddings for trivia players whom he met while hosting.
“You build these relationships that I never could have foreseen. I’ve officiated more than one wedding from trivia players that were like, ‘Will you marry us?’ It’s gotten a little out of hand in some cases. A good out of hand,” Stone joked.
Smith and Stone mentioned the friendly flak they get from regulars when they miss their weekly games. Stone said he’s embraced the role as the face of the game for the people who attend every week. The face-to-face game delivery and the comfort of a familiar atmosphere is what he thinks keeps people coming.
“People come in because they want to hear a real person on the other side of the microphone and not just tap a button and look at a computer screen like you could do on your phone or your house on the couch,” said Stone.
The moratorium on face-to-face interactions caused by COVID took missing trivia games to a new level. Stone told a story about how customers at Northside Tavern in Cincinnati reached out to him when games were canceled to see if he could host games virtually. After getting permission from Last Call to use their questions, Stone started hosting games over Zoom.
“That kind of highlighted how important it is to people. Not just to go answer general knowledge trivia, right, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about getting together with your people and having a good time and having laughs and getting through the week,” said Stone.