Jay-Z and Bing.com 

When I worked for an advertising agency, my boss asked everyone working on the account service team to examine a creative campaign, and report to the rest of the agency the successful components which made their campaign ‘award winning.’

When I hear the words sponsorship, I often think about race cars covered with hundreds of decals representing large corporations looking for another venue to display their brand. So when I was handed a sponsorship campaign to examine, I didn’t expect to discover anything profound…

What I learned from this assignment was sponsorship isn’t always about money, and a few decals, it’s about creativity, hype, and should benefit all parties involved.

Rapper, R&B artist, and soon to be author Jay-Z was ready to launch his book Decoded in November 2010. Also eager to make a debut in the market was Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing.com.

Knowing they faced stiff competition particularly with Google, Bing knew they needed to do something different, effective, and never seen before in order to have a chance in the search engine market.

So what did they do? They decided to become a sponsor. Yes! A sponsor. Bing wasn’t looking for money, or help from a large organization to help launch their brand; Bing wanted to use their product, a search engine, to bring awareness of other brands like no other search engine had done before…

Each of the book’s 320 pages were blown-up and placed strategically across 13 major cities, including New York. The pages showed up on parked cars, billboard, basketball courts, high-rise rooftops, and even the bottom of the swimming pool at Miami’s Delano Hotel. 

Once the pages of Decode were successfully placed, Bing released hints and clues using Facebook and Twitter revealing the location of the pages. With these hints, users then used Bing’s satellite search component (similar to Google earth) to find and read the pages with the goal of unlocking all 320 pages.

As a result, Jay-Z fans were able to read his book prior to release, and Bing.com, through this sponsorship was able to showcase its abilities.

Within a month of the campaign going live, users had unlocked every single page of the book before it was even available for sale. Bing received an 11.7 per cent increase of visitors while the campaign was live with an average player engagement of 11 minutes.  Jay Z’s Facebook page received one million ‘likes’ in under a month and his autobiography reached 3^rd in the New York Times Best Seller list (slingshot sponsorship), and won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix.


-JS