Case Study 3: Jay-Z DECODED

Out of all my examples, I found this one the most interesting. Jay-Z, a huge hip-hop star joined with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, to create an huge transmedia campaign around his biography, Decoded, which was to be released as a book after the campaign. The campaign was a huge success for both Jay-Z and Bing, which entered the Top 10 most visited sites list for the first time as a result.

32 pages of Jay-Z’s book were placed in different locations relating to that particular page in the book. Each day for 1 month, a different page was revealed in a different place around the world. There were pages printed on billboards, on the bottom of swimming pools and inside Gucci jackets as well as many other unusual places. The campaign used the platforms of Facebook, Twitter and radio to reveal clues as to the whereabouts of the pages of Jay-Z’s book around the world. The user could then use the online game, and the maps function on Bing to find these clues and piece them together. The user could virtually walk through Jay-Z’s life.

I think one the the most clever things about this campaign is how it stretched the boundaries of regular uses of transmedia and showed the audience a brand new way of interacting with an artist. The use of Bing maps gave you the opportunity to virtually go out into the world and see this campaign in reality, but through a computer screen.

I think this campaign exceeded anyone’s expectations of a regular book campaign. Book transmedia campaigns often feature films or short YouTube clips, video games are also not uncommon, but this was at a whole new level of interaction with the artist. You were able to live Jay-Z’s life story through various media platforms, the primary one being Bing. This would have primarily appealed to Jay-Z’s large fan-base, but due to the unusual nature of the campaign it is likely that many other people would have gotten involved.

This campaign has now ended as the book has been released. Another step they could take in the transmedia campaign would be to make a film of Jay-Z’s life based on the book, which I’m sure will happen one day in the future.

This project accurately fits the idea of transmedia because it is taking a story, in this case the story Jay-Z tells of his life in his book, and allowing the audience to interact with it through various platforms. I think this is a very unique case of transmedia and also a very successful case. The campaign also won many awards and was hugely publicized at the time. The amount of money that must have gone into it paid off due to the increase in users on Bing, and the extra followers Jay-Z gained on Facebook/Twitter, as well as the success of his book.

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