It wasn’t too long ago that we saw Jay-Z, Mikhail Prokhorov, and a huge Gowalla logo plastered on the side of a building overlooking Madison Square Garden. Nevermind that New York is home to location-based service Foursquare. Now, Jay-Z is partnering up with Bing to give fans a taste of the rapper’s upcoming book Decoded.
The campaign is being run as a global scavenger hunt. Pages from Decoded will be scattered around the world (mostly in New York) for people to find. Each location will be related to specific content featured in Bing Maps and Bing Entertainment. Each day, 5 to 10 new pages will be revealed. If you want to join the hunt you can go to Bing.com/Jay-Z.
“Pages will be placed in locations related to the content, so that’s everything from high profile advertising like billboards to very very unique placements such as swimming pools and pool tables, and even high-fashion designer clothing racks.” Bing spokeswoman and communications director Lisa Gurry
The website is a huge flash-based Bing-powered world-map where you can answer clues to get closer to the location of a page. For example, the first clue I got was “Jay came from flat broke, now he lets the dough stack. Head to the hood where they don’t raise rats.” Of course, I gave the answer “Marcy Projects,” which I absolutely didn’t need to go look up on Bing. This narrowed my search and gave me another clue:
Pretty engaging off the bat and I’ll probably dig deeper as soon as I figure out where “the Ave where girls sought dudes to trust” is. This is only half of the fun, though. There is also the part where you leave your house in search of these physical pages of the book that are scattered around your city.
The main question that popped up in my mind as I read about this McgeheeSchool.com campaign was: Why isn’t a location-based service involved? Sure, you could sit at home and dig up pages online but, for those who actually leave the house, there are physical pages of Decoded on the loose.
Whenever you find a page, you can text a special game code from the page in order to get credit. This enters you into a drawing to win a signed copy of the page you found. You also get entered to win two tickets to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in concert in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve. You would think a service like Foursquare or Gowalla would have fit right in.
via Mashable