Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment

by Anita Elberse

  Carter’s desire to push the envelope had fueled the idea to write a book in the first place. Far from a traditional autobiography, the forty-year-old rap mogul’s publishing debut was what he called a “lyrical memoir” that explained the hidden meanings behind some of his most provocative songs and provided a personal narrative of his life and art. In a collage-like manner, the book pieced together an assortment of autobiographical fragments, lyrics, and images—effectively “decoding” the metaphors and veiled messages captured in his many hit songs—and took the reader on a tour of Carter’s life, thereby providing a unique perspective on the history of hip-hop music and culture. John Meneilly, Carter’s manager and a partner in Roc Nation—a joint venture between Carter and Live Nation that serves as an umbrella company for Carter’s artist management, music recording and publishing, touring, merchandising, and other new business ventures—saw the book as a profound statement. “For us, the book is a way to communicate that rap music is a real art form, that it is serious, and not a set of nursery rhymes,” he told me. “Every single word in a song is there for a reason.”

  Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the world’s largest trade publisher, Random House, purchased the rights to Decoded in 2009 and planned to publish it in November 2010. “We see a lot of celebrity projects and most do not interest us, but we felt that Jay had something very interesting to say,” remarked Julie Grau, senior vice president and publisher at Random House. She was one of a select group of publishers invited to meet with Meneilly to discuss the book. Meneilly knew that the format Carter had chosen might come as a surprise to potential publishers. “When Random House walked into the room, I am sure they thought it would either be a biography or business book,” Meneilly commented. “But when we said it was a lyrical memoir, they embraced it.”

  Carter and Meneilly soon told Grau they did not want the publisher to pursue a traditional book launch. Grau distinctly recalled their conversation: “[Carter] said, ‘Don’t tell me to do something because that is the way it is done. That is a reason for me not to do it.’” Meneilly added: “We told Random House, ‘Take everything you normally do when you launch a book, and throw it out the window. We don’t want to just check boxes. Of course we have to do the nuts and bolts—we’ll do a book signing—but we want to be innovative.’ That is Jay-Z’s mantra: do something different every time.”

  And so, not long after acquiring the book, Spiegel & Grau reached out to David Droga and Andrew Essex, co-founders of the young advertising agency Droga5, for help in developing a groundbreaking campaign. Essex, a New York City native, served as Droga5’s chief executive officer, while Australian-born Droga served as the agency’s creative chairman. (He also supplied the agency’s name: when he was a child, his mother stitched “Droga5” into his underwear to distinguish them from his four other brothers’ undergarments.) As it happened, Droga5 was just then wrestling with another challenge: how to drive higher usage of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. Droga5’s solution was to kill two birds with one idea: a massive, interactive scavenger hunt. In the months leading up to the Decoded release, each of the memoir’s three hundred pages would be unveiled in various media (from billboards and bus shelters to more unconventional advertising surfaces such as cars, jackets, and even the bottom of a hotel pool). Players around the world would search for clues distributed via Bing to find the locations of those pages, “unlock” them, and gradually piece together the book in both the physical and digital world, winning prizes along the way. “Jay-Z’s book is unique in its design and its concept,” said Essex of the memoir. “We feel it deserves a unique campaign, too.”

  Droga5 expected its bold idea for Jay-Z’s campaign to cost approximately $2 million in labor and materials alone. But Spiegel & Grau lacked the funds to market Carter’s memoir at a scale fit for a superstar; the publisher’s advertising budget, Grau admitted, “won’t even buy us a billboard.” This is where Bing came in: Droga and Essex hoped that Microsoft would see the innovative campaign—when powered by Bing—as a unique opportunity to help Web users “break the Google habit.”

  Droga5’s co-founders faced a difficult task as they worked to broker an unprecedented partnership among Roc Nation, Random House, and a team overseen by Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services division. For Carter, Roc Nation, and Random House, two factors were critical: selling books (rather than giving them away for free) and maintaining a high degree of control over the campaign. “Jay-Z has to sign off on everything,” said Meneilly. For Microsoft, having the final say was key, too: “If we pay for the campaign, we want to be the approver,” said Mehdi, whose primary objective was to grow awareness and usage of Bing. While Droga5’s co-founders worried about “whether the center of the partnership would hold,” as Essex put it, they had to weigh the possible benefits and costs for Droga5 itself. If Jay-Z’s memoir was going to succeed in the marketplace, the unlikely group of partners would have to find a way to share their playbook.

  * * *

  What should we make of the deal among Roc Nation, Random House, Microsoft, and Droga5? Although undertaking this alliance may sound like a formula for disaster, if we analyze the situation we learn that it in fact makes good sense for each of the players. More importantly, the story of the Decoded campaign tells us a lot about the future of blockbuster strategies. The highly innovative book launch—which in the end won Droga5 several of the advertising industry’s most prestigious awards—has everything to do with how digital technology is changing the entertainment landscape. And don’t get me wrong: even if fears about the long tail overtaking blockbusters or content producers being disintermediated are almost certainly overstated, technological advances are having a dramatic impact on entertainment businesses. The Decoded campaign illustrates that point in multiple ways.

  Let’s start with the good news. For those who spend their days (and nights and weekends) launching and promoting entertainment products, digital technologies open up a world of exciting possibilities. The campaign that Droga5 envisioned for Decoded is a prime example: the book’s innovative release simply would not have been possible without advances in technology and the remarkable innovations they have triggered, including social networks, interactive maps, mobile phones equipped with cameras, and photo-sharing applications. These new tools enabled Droga5 to integrate an outdoor and online campaign, blending on-the-street and Internet experiences and ultimately fostering a sense of real contact between Jay-Z and his fans. Such a product launch was unimaginable in a fully analog world.

  Here is how the campaign unfolded. The agency released the book in the form of two hundred placements through various media across the globe in the month leading up to the launch. Each release of a new page—every day of the campaign saw about ten of them—provided an opportunity for people to discover a location that was important to Jay-Z’s life and music. The campaign used traditional outdoor media—including billboards, subway stations, and bus shelters—in such high-profile places as New York City’s Times Square, the Strip in Las Vegas, and London’s Covent Garden. But it also employed more adventurous advertising surfaces, such as the inner lining of a Gucci jacket featured in the window of Gucci’s flagship Fifth Avenue store, the bottom of the pool at Miami Beach’s high-end Delano Hotel, the rooftop of a New Orleans building, and the stage curtain of the Apollo Theater. Some of these placements were true works of art.

  The book’s pages were not just randomly placed, either: the location of every page was inspired by the story on that page, which helped fans put Carter’s memoir in context. For example, if page 24 of Decoded referred to a particular street corner in Brooklyn where Carter used to sell drugs, that page was displayed on a billboard on that corner. Or if page 156 discussed Carter’s co-ownership of the restaurant The Spotted Pig, that page was printed on the restaurant’s plates or place mats. Each page was branded with a “Decode Jay-Z” watermark and a description of how someone could participate in the game. By texting a simple
code to a designated number to “decode” a page, players could win a variety of rewards, including autographed copies of Decoded.

  Meanwhile, in the game’s online component, Jay-Z released a pair of clues for each page on his Facebook and Twitter accounts and on the game’s web site, bing.com/jay-z. The first clue narrowed down the geographic region in which the page could be found, while the second clue pinpointed the page’s exact location. The first players to decipher both clues and enter the correct location on a digital map were then able to “unlock” a page and gain the chance to win a second set of prizes, including a personal Facebook message from Jay-Z. In addition, on-the-street players could submit a photo they had taken of the page to the game’s web site. As more and more pages were discovered on the street, the web site gradually revealed the entire book. Those players who digitally assembled the entire book were automatically entered into a drawing for the grand prize that was the dream of every Jay-Z fan: two lifetime passes to each of the star’s concerts, anywhere in the world.

  The campaign delivered the result Random House and Carter hoped for. Millions of people interacted with the game, and an active community of players exchanged information about the book’s pages online. Jay-Z’s Facebook followers grew by a million during the campaign. Even more important to the book’s event-style launch, major news outlets and cultural influencers across the globe covered the campaign: in one month, the launch earned over a billion media impressions. Even other celebrities weighed in: “Jay-Z killed it with the Bing promo for his book,” tweeted Trey Songz, and Ryan Seacrest wrote: “This is crazy.… Jay-Z is hiding 300 pages of his new book around the world … fans get to find them.” Many tweets included links to the “Decode Jay-Z” web site, fueling even more excitement for the memoir. Helped by the free publicity, Decoded hit the bestsellers list and stayed there for nineteen straight weeks. Priced at $35, the book sold three hundred thousand copies—ten times as many as fellow rapper Eminem’s 2008 book, The Way I Am, and more than enough to ensure that Spiegel & Grau earned back its advance to the author.

  * * *

  The Decoded launch was unique, but many other entertainment products have also benefitted from eye-catching digital campaigns. For instance, a so-called alternate reality game (or ARG), which relies on digital media to create immersive entertainment experiences, powered the marketing of Year Zero, an album released by the band Nine Inch Nails in 2007. To promote the record, digital agency 42 Entertainment orchestrated an elaborate quest that began with secret messages and phone numbers hidden on T-shirts sold by the band, and later involved an intricate network of web sites, an unmarked USB stick (found by a fan at a concert venue restroom) that contained a never-before-heard track and other clues, and voice messages distributed through cell phones. The quest culminated in a gathering of hundreds of fans at an abandoned warehouse, where they were treated to a surprise Nine Inch Nails performance. The album received a great deal of free online and offline publicity as a result.

  Similar tactics have been used to promote movies, too. Warner Bros. teamed up with 42 Entertainment to develop an ARG (known as Why So Serious?) for its blockbuster movie The Dark Knight. In May 2007, more than a year in advance of the film’s release, fans uncovered the first photograph of actor Heath Ledger as Batman’s nemesis the Joker, who through various clues made it known that his goal was to build an army of henchmen. At the comic-book convention Comic-Con, “Jokerized” $1 bills were handed out to attendees, a plane wrote messages in the sky, and scores of fans ran through the streets of San Diego dressed as the Joker. In a yearlong game that involved hundreds of Web pages, interactive games, e-mails, videos, and collectibles, fans were given the opportunity to explore the characters and themes of the movie through events that prompted them to do everything from searching for ringing cakes with baked-in cell phones to organizing real-world protests in support of the fictional character Harvey Dent.

  More recently, movie studio Lionsgate won accolades for its digital-marketing campaign for The Hunger Games, which used Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks to connect with fans of the book on which the film was based. Well ahead of the movie’s March 2012 launch date, the studio’s digital team launched a site, TheCapitol.pn, that allowed fans to register for a fictional “district,” giving them an identity and making it possible for them to interact with other fans inside and outside their district. Tumblr pages and YouTube videos showcased the movie’s costumes and makeup. The release of each central character’s poster and trailer became huge events online—one trailer accumulated eight million views within twenty-four hours—that were then integrated with offline events such as media appearances by cast members.

  It is virtually impossible to say to what extent these digital-media efforts helped drive sales, even though Year Zero peaked at number two on the Billboard Top 200 album chart and both The Dark Knight and The Hunger Games were smash hits at the box office. But digital media definitely provide novel ways for writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other media producers to forge connections with their fans. Another advantage of digital-media campaigns is that they can make marketing dollars go a long way. That’s because the most successful examples engage audiences and motivate them to help: when celebrities spread the word on Jay-Z’s book release, or when regular consumers participate in scavenger hunts, share videos and other campaign materials, or buzz about product launches to their Facebook friends, they can substantially increase the reach of a campaign.

  In my own research, I have examined how movie and video game trailers get passed around online. The raw data for well over a hundred trailers show that sharing happens on a massive scale: videos that the studios upload on video-sharing sites such as YouTube are frequently redistributed by users, either in their original form or as altered “derivative” works in the form of spoofs, remixes, and mash-ups. Such user-generated placements, my research shows, can significantly—and cheaply—enhance the spread of advertising campaigns. For many trailers in my study, in fact, the number of views generated by users’ videos was several times greater than the number of views for the original videos planted by advertisers. For instance, of the six million views that the trailer for Sony Pictures’ movie Angels and Demons (starring Tom Hanks) amassed on YouTube, more than 70 percent came from videos placed by users, not the studio itself. And that film is an underperformer: across the sample of trailers, 89 percent of the three hundred million advertising views came from videos placed voluntarily by users. With the right strategy, the study shows, producers can benefit from the work done by fans and inexpensively reach many more potential customers.

  No one who understands the entertainment industry would take this to mean that content producers can forgo traditional advertising spending, however. Producers who rely on digital media when launching their creations should not expect any miracles. In fact, many of the same factors that drive success offline also drive success online. Consumers may actively participate in promoting new entertainment products online, but they turn out in force primarily for the biggest brands—titles such as Call of Duty and The Hunger Games—that spend heavily on traditional advertising. Here, too, blockbuster strategies pay off handsomely.

  * * *

  It is a boon to entertainment businesses that new digital tools can enable more innovative—and sometimes less expensive—product launches, but that is not nearly the full story. The Decoded launch also illustrates another aspect of the likely future of blockbuster strategies: the growing importance of partnerships between content producers on the one hand and corporations that often have distinctly different goals on the other. Although the pairing of Roc Nation and Microsoft may have been odd, such connections will become more commonplace. With the campaign for his memoir, Jay-Z is pointing the way to a new model that is born out of both opportunity and necessity. In today’s world, publishers and other content producers often can’t afford the kind of blockbuster campaign that a superstar of Jay-Z’s caliber expects and deserves.


  Random House, a division of the private German media company Bertelsmann, is one of the “big six” publishing companies and generates well over $2 billion in revenues across hundreds of titles each year. But its Spiegel & Grau imprint releases only about twenty new hardcover titles each year, and Decoded—which Grau acquired for what she described to me as a “seven-figure” advance—instantly became one of the imprint’s biggest investments. Grau was well aware of the risks, especially given the difficult business climate: “The book-publishing industry is under fire, and we’ve been left with Barnes & Noble and Amazon as the two major national accounts. With a book by Jay-Z, you will have content that is unsuitable for accounts such as Walmart, so we are staking everything on a small number of retailers,” she said. Some of Grau’s fears were eased when she attended Carter’s The Blueprint 3 tour at Madison Square Garden. “I realized that everybody in the audience—this whole carpet of twenty thousand people—knew the lyrics to every Jay-Z song. I was like ‘Okay, we are good here.’” But with only a small team (which besides Grau consisted of executive editor Chris Jackson, a marketing director, a publicist, and two digital-content experts) working on the book, options for a huge campaign were limited.

  The publisher’s budget was not quite what Jay-Z’s team had anticipated. “When we first got around to discussing the marketing plans, we asked Random House what kind of budget they had,” Meneilly recalled. “Grau nervously wrote down a figure on a piece a paper and slid it over to me. It said $50,000. I was shocked. You have to realize—this barely covers Jay-Z’s costs when he travels to an event. I thought she was missing a couple of zeros.” Grau assured him that she had written down the right amount and later explained: “There are a lot of costs that we incur that are not included in that number—the galleys that you create for a book, for instance, or the promotional co-op costs that keep the book on a front table at Barnes & Noble throughout the holiday season. But even then, I knew what we could do would amount to a tiny fraction of what gets spent to promote an album for a superstar like Jay-Z.”