Bing teams up with Jay Z to take on Google

If you are going to take on Google at search then you are going to have to hire some heavy hitters, which is exactly what Bing did when they brought in Jay Z and developed this brilliant innovative campaign to help launch his book. The book, which is called Decode was seeded out in to the real world one page at a time in a number of innovative ways including on billboards, on the bottom of swimming pools and even wrapped on a car.

Fans were able to track down the new pages in the book using Bing maps and clues left within Bing search engines and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The average time spent on the campaign site was a whopping 11 minutes and Jay Z grew his Facebook fans by one million as a result. The promotion helped the book to hit the best sellers list for 19 straight weeks. That was all great for Jay Z but by linking with him and tapping into a new audience Bing was able to grow its search queries by 11% in just one month and that is the reason why this is an award winning campaign that picked up awards at the Cannes festival last month. It’s a great start by Bing in taking the fight to Google and it’s going to need more stunts like this if it is to continue grabbing search market share.