Jay-Z teams up with Bing to Dethrone Google For A Few Days

How do you dethrone Google temporarily?  You execute one of the most creative marketing campaigns of the year.  It yielded 1.1 billion media impressions, took precious market share from Google, and got a book on the best-seller list.  Bing teamed up with Jay-Z to launch his new book Decode by plastering all 320 pages of it — one page at a time — in different locations and in very unusual ways around the world for 30 days before the book was released for sale.

 Primary Goal of Campaign

• To drive millions of people away from Google to start using BING for Internet search and maps.

The Campaign

They began by staying true to each brand weaving Jay-Z’s very personal story, his journey through life and where it took him around the world, into Bing’s search and mapping technologies every day of the 30 day campaign.  Each page of the book was reproduced and put into the real world in a number of innovative ways including on billboards, the top of parking garages, on building walls where Jay-Z grew up, to the bottom of a swimming pool.  A website was created for the campaign where each day new clues were released on Twitter, Facebook, and Bing. You would then use Bing’s search and maps to “decode” the clue and find the location of the page and be the first to locate where the pages released that day were around the world.  Over the 30 days, all the pages of the book were released so by the end of the campaign, you would have read the book.

Results

• Average time a person was on the campaign’s landing page was 11 minutes.
• Bing got 11.7% increase in visits to their search engine which finally tipped them into the Top 10 of most visited websites in the world.
• The campaign yielded 1.1 billion media impressions
• Jay-Z’s Facebook page grew by 1,000,000 fans
• Jay-Z’s book, Decode was on the best seller list for 19 straight weeks.
• Every major news channel and newspaper covered the campaign.
• Large numbers of people started using BING for search and mapping over Google
• This campaign became part of popular culture for an entire month.

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