Bing x Jay-Z Case Study

Following today’s lecture about creativity we learnt about guerrilla marketing and most specifically the campaign Bing launched in 2010 with Jay-Z preparing for the upcoming launch of his autobiography Decoded. This huge marketing campaign started with an idea and then escalated into something massive that benefited both Bing and Jay-Z. The main points were to work with Jay-Z, create hype about his book, increase relevance and most importantly get people using Bing. They started by placing pages of his book all over the world inspired by the place Jay-Z is talking about on that particular page, these were released everyday encouraging people to use the website to find clues, and then go out to look for them. Items were created such as Gucci jackets, burgers, plaques, and a cadillac all printed with words from his book. Not only were fans of Jay-Z taking part, but people who enjoyed conceptual art and wanted to see the installations, or just because they want to join the social media hype. It opened up to a whole new audience using Bing. I particularly loved this whole campaign as it is extremely creative in the idea of how they presented the words. Making the whole thing into a game where you have to get clues and find something engages the public and brings in people that may not have previously used Bing or knew who Jay-Z was. The whole concept was clearly successful as average player engagement was over 11 minutes per visit, Jay-Z’s Facebook fans grew by 1 million, Decoded hit the Best Sellers List for 19 weeks straight, it was covered by every major news outlet, and in only 1 month Bing saw an 11.7% increase in visits entering the Global Top 10 Most Visited Sites for the first time, and the campaign earned 1.1 billion global media impressions. Pretty great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNic4wf8AYg