'Jay-Z/Bing' Wins Grand Prix for Droga5

Cannes, France– A campaign pairing Bing with the launch of Jay-Z’s autobiography “Decoded” has won a Grand Prix Lion in the Outdoor category, in the first of what could be many Lions for the Droga5-created effort this week.

While “Decode Jay-Z With Bing” was based on an out-of-home concept, its entry point and much of the experience played out online.

Each of the book’s 320 pages was printed and installed in a different spot across 13 major cities. Locations were selected based on the content of each page, so that a section dealing with Brooklyn would be installed in that borough, UK in London, and so on. They appeared on media as varied as rooftops, bus stops, a Cadillac, leather jacket linings, and restaurant plates.

Droga5 then created a race of sorts, seeding clues about the location of pages on Twitter, radio, and Facebook. Users were driven to bing.com/jayz, where they used Bing search to decipher successive clues that led them to a specific location. Using Bing Maps, players were told precisely where the page was. The first fans on the scene texted a code to expose the page to the whole community.

Over one month in October and November 2010, Droga5 seeded 400 clues, exposing 5 to 10 pages of the book per day. By month’s end players had assembled the entire book online before it hit stores.

The campaign drove an 11.7 percent increase in visits to Bing while it was live, according to Microsoft’s internal numbers. Average engagement per player topped 11 minutes. While the campaign was live, Jay-Z grew his Facebook “likes” by 1 million.