Jay initially hooked up with the creative agency Droga5, who conceived, created, implemented, produced, and delivered the campaign with the help of Microsoft search engine Bing. Droga5 slapped all 320 pages of Decoded in various blown-up sizes on some unexpected surfaces: a rooftop in New Orleans, a pool bottom in Miami (above), cheeseburger wrappers in New York City, a pool table in Jay’s 40/40 Club, and many more.
Fans could log on to bing.com/jay-z between Oct. 18 and Nov. 20–last Saturday–and follow clues to Bing Maps locations and real life places where text from the book was blown up bigger than life or layered onto a guitar, onto records in jukeboxes, or onto a 1980s Cadillac parked in front of a Run-DMC mural in Queens. The most dedicated followers could read the whole book for free weeks before it came out. Plus, anyone who unlocked a page online or in person (by texting a code located on the physical page) was entered to win that page signed by Jay-Z or tickets to a Jay-Z/Coldplay New Year’s Eve concert in Las Vegas.
Then, at the very last minute, Bing and Droga5 decided that one lucky person who’d decoded all 200 clues using Bing Maps would get The Jay-Z Lifetime Pass, a golden ticket of sorts, good for admission for two to any Jay-Z concert anywhere on the planet for life.
“We heard a story through our Facebook page of a woman, a lawyer, who more or less hired a team of six or seven people who all scouted through the clues,” Bing General Manager Eric Hadley tells Fast Company.
The average time it took to decode the online clues was a little more than five minutes, he says. But it was the repeat visits that Hadley says were such a boon to Bing.
To get the whole book, “you had to go into Bing Maps and interact with Bing up to three times a day,” Hadley says, adding that the behavior helped visitors “break the habit” of using other search engines.
Jay-Z was a natural match for the so-called “decision engine,” Hadley says: “We’ve had a pretty long history with Jay-Z. He was the focus of a conference we did at Microsoft. We introduced him to Bill Gates a while ago.”
And beyond the artist’s penchant for dropping locations, Jay aligned with Bing’s users. People ages 18 to 24 consume 61% more search pages online than the average Web user. African-American Web surfers view 29% more search pages. Affluent African-Americans are more likely to use Bing as their primary search than Google, Hadley says. And users who listen to hip-hop at least once a week consume 19% more search pages online in any given month than the general population.