OUDF503: Bing & Jay Z Trans-Media Marketing Campaign

Jay-Z's media campaign for decoded was created by a Miami Ad School graduate and industry practitioner named Jon Kubik, he is the senior art director on this campaign and is based in New York. Jon worked along closely with Jay Z and the search engine known as Microsoft Bing. Decoded is an auto biography book by Jay-Z that talks about the rapper's life over the years. 

The book is very specific to locations of things that happened throughout Jay-Z's life, so they came up with this idea of a geographic auto biography. Working with Microsoft Bing, this was a great chance for them to incorporate pop culture trans-media, so the idea of a geographic auto biography was to Geo tag each location from the book into Bing's maps online and places different pages on those actual locations so people could search and assemble the book ones by one. The most interesting locations were the time square in NY

The other was at the bottom of a hotel pool in Miami

And the other were pages printed in plates at a restaurant in Manhattan where Jay-z spoke about eating a burger with Bono.

With a project of this magnitude, it took them over a year to present all the 300 pages at different locations.

Jon spoke about how the collaboration process was important in this project as it was a production nightmare that needed them to be on top of their game constantly in order to keep Jay Z and Bing happy.