Decode Jay-Z
- Brand
- Jay-Z
- Year
- 2010
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Vertigo
- With
- Droga5 NY
Objective
Random House needed to launch Jay-Z's memoir "Decoded" worldwide on a modest budget, and Bing needed to prove it belonged in the search wars — not by advertising the product, but by making Bing Maps and Bing Search the tools people actually had to use to win.
Solution
Every day at bing.com/jay-z, the player got a fresh clue about a moment or lyric from Jay-Z's life — 5 to 10 new book pages went live each day, printed nowhere but on real surfaces in the real world. Working out the clue pointed to an actual location — a pool bottom in Miami, a jacket lining in a Gucci window, the felt of a pool table — and from there the player picked a path: hunt the spot on Bing's interactive 3D maps from a browser, with a heat/cold proximity meter guiding them in, or go find the physical page in person. A page found online was logged straight into the game; a page found on the street was claimed by texting in the unique code printed on it. Every catch carried a shot at winning that same page signed by Jay-Z, and players pieced the book together publicly by posting photos of what they'd found, racing to complete all 300 pages before "Decoded" hit shelves.
Results
Bing.com traffic rose 11.7% over the campaign month, with 1.1 billion global media impressions and an average of 11 minutes of engagement per site visit. Jay-Z's Facebook following grew by 1 million. Players surfaced more than 105 of the book's pages in the first ten days alone. "Decoded" itself debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on it for more than 19 weeks.
- 1
The hub sits at bing.com/jay-z, where the game announces that Jay-Z's entire autobiography "Decoded" has been scattered across the world ahead of its November 16 store release, and players are tasked with reassembling it. New pages unlock daily, 5-10 at a time, through the contest window running to November 20.
- 2
Each page comes with a riddle tied to a fact from Jay-Z's life or a line from one of his songs. Players research the answer through Bing search, decoding the clue into a real-world city and object where that page is hidden.
- 3
One path to a page runs entirely online: players navigate Bing's interactive 3D street maps across cities like New York, Los Angeles, London, and Miami, guided by a proximity meter that reads hotter or colder as they approach the hidden spot. Some pages, such as the Hurricane Katrina pages on a New Orleans parking garage roof, are visible only from Bing Maps' satellite view.
- 4
The other path sends players out into 15 cities to find the physical page in person, printed on a surface that matches its content — a hotel pool floor, a Gucci window display, a pizza box, a boxing gym's punching bags.
- 5
A physical find carries a unique code that the player texts in by SMS to lock in the discovery.
- 6
Every verified find, whether spotted online or claimed by SMS, enters the player for a chance to win that page itself, signed by Jay-Z, from a pool of 200 pages. The campaign's grand prize is a pair of tickets to a Jay-Z and Coldplay New Year's concert in Las Vegas, and reports describe a further top prize of a lifetime concert pass for whoever solves every clue.
- 7
Players upload photos of the pages they've found back onto the site, collectively rebuilding the book online before it reaches shelves.
- 8
Alongside the hunt, a Bing Entertainment layer lets players read the full lyrics tied to each page and buy the associated music.
