I love Beyonce.

Please don’t judge me, even though I know you secretly are. So to clarify a few things before you do condemn me. I solely blame Spotify and specifically Spotify combined with my daughter who has hijacked my account and therefore dictates my listening pleasure and all the suggestions I receive on my Daily mix.

I do however have to admit that whilst she is going through a Beyonce phase, I too seem to be enjoying her music a lot more and am now an official fan boy, or should I say part of the BeyHive.

So in a moment of driving, singing along with Bey, I was thinking, and what I thought about was not Bey but her lesser know half, Jay-Z. Ok maybe not so lesser known but regardless I was thinking about him and the launch of his autobiography, Decoded.

The launch was a tie up with Bing, yes Bing. For those that don’t know there is another search engine out there other than Google and it’s Microsofts equivalent. However, that was the problem as no one really knew or used Bing in this Google controlled universe. What Bing needed to do was get into the hearts and minds of people and in turn be the go to choice for search. 

They came to Droga 5 with this problem and wanted a solution to getting into popular culture by demonstrating their product features specifically search and mapping.

What Droga 5 did was an idea that was so simple, perfectly planned and then perfectly paired with Jay-Z who was about to launch his book. They executed the campaign in an amazing, beautiful way whilst getting people involved by using Bing daily and seamlessly demonstrating Bing’s product features, namely search and mapping.

By using the highly anticipated launch of Jay-Z’s autobiography, they not only tapped into a massive fan base but also immediately were playing in the popular culture territory that Bing wanted to break into. Every day for a month prior to the book launch, a page of the book was released into the real world and across multiple locations relevant to the content of that page.  

This is where they made the magic. 

They put the pages in places that were relevant to Jay-Z and his life story. Not just using large outdoor formats in typical locations or bus shelters, yes they had those. But what they did was place pages in and across different media anywhere and everywhere. And if the media didn’t exist, they created it. This was extra topping on an already interesting idea.

You could find a page printed on pool tables, boxing bags, bronze plaques, burger wraps, plates, Gucci jackets with the story sewn on the inside or even at the bottom of a pool. They also had a fully wrapped Cadillac parked on the streets just to step it up a notch. The pages where everywhere and anywhere and brilliantly executed.

A true testament of if it doesn’t exist, make it. And make it beautiful.

This is one of the main reasons I love this idea and wish I had done that. Not only did they create anticipation for the book but brought the core of the story to life in a beautiful and relevant way by creating interesting and new locations and created new media landscapes.

They not only tapped into the fanbase who were dying to find the pages and they turned it into a game, enticing fans to be the first to find the page for internet fame using Bing’s search engine and maps. 

Using Bing’s features, users could digitally build the book page by page, using fan photos or screen grabs to complete the book weeks before the hardcover was released into stores, a nice little touch to the millions of fans.

So, not only did they give fans the chance of a pre-launch digital version of the book by using real pages out in the world relevant to Jay-Z’s story but they made it cool, they made it fun and they made it for real.

Another great example of the two worlds working together seamlessly.

This 1 month activation sparked massive media interest across the world with all channels covering this, from pop culture to mainstream news channels. Even the celebrity circuit started getting involved and talking about it which amplified this even further. 

This campaign contributed to one of the most successful book launches ever with Decoded being on the best seller list for 19 weeks straight and a sell out launch. 

Jay-Z was happy.

It embedded Jay-Z even further into pop culture and grew his fan base by over 1 million on Facebook in the 1 month. Jay-Z wasn’t the only one who was happy with this as Bing managed to successfully entrench itself into popular culture, hit over a billion media impressions and reached the top most visited sites list for the first time since it was launched beating Google, plus they picked up way more Grand Prix’s at every award show that year than Google did.

So there are two things that I take out of this, one is “I wish I had done that” and two, Beyonce is amazing.

“I wish I had done that” - Gary