Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Jay-Z feat. Droga 5 - Decoded


Droga5 put together a unique interactive campaign to help promote rapper, Jay-Z's, new book Decoded. It has all the typical usual trends (facebook, twitter, search engines, sharing) blended in with some traditional heavy hitters (outdoor ads and radio), but don't compare it to your typical "go online and share your brand experience with us" type of baloney. Here's an excerpt from an article in the NYTimes:

Beginning Monday, reproductions of entire pages of the book will appear unannounced in locales referred to in those pages. (...) If in certain pages Jay-Z is talking about something related to Times Square, then those pages might be on billboards in Times Square. (...) [The] rest will be offbeat, printed in one instance on the bottom of a hotel swimming pool, in another on the lining of jackets in a store display window (...)

Microsoft will host a Web page, Bing.com/Jay-Z, that will function as an online scavenger hunt (....) [that] showcases a 3-D map based on photographs (like Google Street View), which enables users to click on a spot on a map, then amble around at street level and look anywhere, as a pedestrian might. (...) Players will follow clues to bring them in the general vicinity of pages, while a “proximity meter” on the screen will indicate when they are getting closer. Players who are the first to discover the pages will be eligible to win a signed copy of the book and the grand prize, a trip to Las Vegas to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in a New Year’s Eve concert.

“People were lining up to be part of this, like premium hotel brands and sports stadiums,” Mr. Droga said. “It’s a sincerely mutually beneficial partnership. At the center is Jay-Z’s book, but all the players at the table stand to benefit.”

To me, the campaign is really more about getting pages of the book out there rather than a contest. And if that is the goal, I think this is a really clever way of doing it. Read the full article at NYTimes and order the book on Amazon.

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