“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”

New York’s Droga5 has been doing some cool work with Jay-Z and Microsoft recently.

To promote the release of Jay-Z’s upcoming memoirs, Decoded, he has teamed up with Microsoft’s ‘decision engine’ (I’m pretty sure it’s still a search engine) Bing to create an online interactive game.

I say online game, but really this is a multi-platform mash-up of online, offline, real world, crowd sourcing, the written word and more.

Put simply, it’s a location-based scavenger hunt. Everyday between 18^th October and November 20^th, 5 to 10 clues are distributed via Bing, Jay-Z’s website, Facebook and Twitter. These clues, once decoded (clever!), supply the location of where a specific page of the book is displayed, be it a poster in a bus shelter, on a billboard, printed on a pool table, at the bottom of a swimming pools or in the lining of a suit. These pages can be located either online or in person (by texting a unique game code from the page) and those who find it enter a draw with the potential of winning a signed copy of their located page.

Wait. There’s more. As well as allowing players to engage in an offline/online game, this experience allows fans to come together as a community and create. Together they take part in a facilitated crowd sourcing, compiling every page of Jay-Z’s book before it’s even in the shops.

This is an integrated campaign for the 21^st century.