Gamification Marketing Examples: M&M vs Jay-Z (Two Recipes, Two Goals)
Two of the most-talked-about gamified marketing campaigns of the early 2010s were running at almost the same time. M&M’s hid a tiny pretzel in a chaotic Facebook image and asked people to find it. Random House and Bing hid every page of Jay-Z’s autobiography across the physical world and asked people to hunt them down. Both went viral. Both got industry awards. Both still get cited in marketing decks fifteen years later. And yet they are not the same campaign in any meaningful sense.
I have used this exact pair in workshops for years, because the contrast is the lesson. Once you put both campaigns under the Octalysis Framework, the differences stop looking like creative choices and start looking like recipes. Different recipes. Different goals. Different reasons each one worked. If you are about to brief a gamified campaign, the question is not whether to copy M&M or copy Jay-Z. The question is which Core Drives your campaign actually needs in the room.
This post walks both campaigns through Octalysis, names what each got right, says what each got wrong, and ends on a small recipe-picking exercise you can run before your next brief.
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- Gamified marketing is a recipe of Core Drives, not a single mechanic. Hunt-and-find is not the recipe. Hunt-and-find is one ingredient.
- M&M’s Eye-Spy Pretzel was tuned for Facebook engagement. Heavy Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity, light Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness, light Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment.
- Jay-Z’s Decoded was tuned for cultural PR. Heavy Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling, heavy CD5 (offline social), CD7 as the hunt layer, CD2 for the badge of finding a page.
- Same surface mechanic, different goal, different recipe. Mismatching the recipe to the goal is how a campaign feels gamified-but-flat.
- Both moments are harder to repeat now. The 2010 organic Facebook reach is gone, and the Decoded budget plus celebrity equity plus pre-Instagram attention economy was a once-in-a-decade alignment.
Table of Contents
In This Article
About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003, years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
I have taught the M&M Eye-Spy and Jay-Z Decoded comparison in workshops with brand teams at consumer-goods companies and entertainment studios for years. Both campaigns get tossed into the same “gamified marketing” bucket in industry decks, and both get copied badly because teams imitate the surface mechanic without naming the Core Drives underneath. The framework I use to take them apart is the same Octalysis lens described in Actionable Gamification and on the Octalysis Framework page. The lesson below is what I tell those workshop rooms before they pick a direction for their own brief.
Two Famous Gamified Campaigns, Two Different Goals
The M&M’s Eye-Spy Pretzel campaign ran on Facebook around 2012 to introduce the new pretzel-filled M&M flavor. The mechanic was simple. M&M’s posted a chaotic, candy-filled image stuffed with characters, M&M shapes, and visual noise. Hidden somewhere in the image was a single small pretzel piece. Players were invited to find it, comment, and share. The image went viral inside the Facebook ecosystem.
The Jay-Z Decoded campaign ran in 2010 as a partnership between Random House and Microsoft’s Bing search engine to promote Jay-Z’s autobiography Decoded. Every one of the book’s pages was placed somewhere in the world. Some pages went on billboards. Some went on the felt of pool tables and the bottoms of swimming pools. Others appeared inside jacket linings, on menus of restaurants Jay-Z had referenced in his lyrics, on a basketball backboard. Players used Bing Maps to find them. The campaign won a Cannes Outdoor Grand Prix and is still studied as a bold content-marketing execution of its era.
Look at the two side by side and the temptation is to call them “the same kind of thing.” Both are hunts. Both reward you with the moment of finding. Both ask you to share. That surface read is what makes the contrast useful. Same surface mechanic, completely different goals. M&M’s was spiking platform-native engagement around a launch flavor that would exist for a few months. Jay-Z and Bing were doing something harder: reframing what each brand was for in the cultural conversation. Jay-Z was selling a memoir, not a single, and needed his book treated as a cultural artifact, not a celebrity tie-in.
Different goals demand different recipes. The Octalysis Framework is the tool I use to read those recipes.
M&M Eye-Spy Pretzel: The Octalysis Recipe
The Eye-Spy image is one of those rare cases where a single asset carries an entire campaign. There is no app to download. There is no signup. The reader does not need to read more than one sentence of copy. They land on the image, their eyes do the work, and the dopamine hit happens inside ten seconds.
That ten-second loop is built on Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity. Curiosity is the drive that makes you keep reading a mystery, scratching a lottery ticket, scrolling a feed. The pretzel is the mystery. You know it is in the image. You do not know where. The brain refuses to let you stop until the question is closed. CD7 is the engine of the campaign and you can feel it pull on you the moment you see the image.
Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment shows up at the moment of finding. The pretzel is small enough that finding it feels like a tiny win. Not a life-changing one. A smug, share-with-a-friend one. That is exactly the right size of accomplishment for a Facebook campaign. If finding the pretzel had required twenty minutes, most users would have given up before CD7 closed the loop. Because it could be solved in seconds, the accomplishment was just big enough to feel earned and just small enough to come fast.
Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness is the third ingredient and it is doing platform-specific work. On Facebook in 2012, comment volume and share volume drove distribution. The Eye-Spy image got both, because the natural way to react to “I found it” is to comment “I found it” or to tag a friend who has not. CD5 in this recipe is light. There is no team. There is no leaderboard. There is no community formed around the campaign. The social layer is just the share itself, and that is enough because the share is the metric.
What you do not see in the recipe is just as important as what you do. There is no Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling. Nobody is trying to convince you the pretzel hunt matters to the world. There is no Core Drive 4 (CD4): Ownership & Possession. You do not own the pretzel after you find it. There is no Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience. The image was up for as long as M&M’s wanted it up, and any user could solve it any time. The recipe is intentionally narrow. Three drives, weighted heavily toward CD7, executed cleanly on the only platform that needed to matter.
This is why I call it a clean execution in workshops. Every choice was downstream of one decision: the goal is Facebook engagement, the platform is Facebook, the metric is shares and comments. Once you know that, you stop adding drives. The recipe is right because nothing extra is in it.
Jay-Z Decoded: A Different Recipe Entirely
If Eye-Spy is a tight three-drive recipe, Decoded is a different cuisine. The campaign starts with CD1: Epic Meaning & Calling, and that is not a small detail. CD1 is the Core Drive that asks you to be part of something bigger than the immediate transaction. In Decoded’s case, the something bigger was a full-scale, real-world treasure hunt for the pages of an autobiography by one of the most-watched cultural figures of his decade. You were not “looking for a hidden image online.” You were “tracking down the next page of Jay-Z’s life story before someone else did, in a city you live in, with friends.” The framing alone changes the meaning of the act.
CD5: Social Influence & Relatedness is the second heavy drive, and it is doing very different work than in the Eye-Spy recipe. The social in Decoded is offline. Players physically met up. They drove to billboards. They went to specific restaurants because a page was hidden in a menu. They told stories at the bar afterward. Pre-Instagram, this kind of in-person, “you had to be there” social proof was the most credible kind of sharing a brand could earn. Friends were not just clicking like on each other’s finds. They were running the hunt together.
CD7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is still in the recipe, but it is a layer, not the engine. The mystery of “where is the next page” is what got you out of your chair. Once you knew the location, the actual experience was logistical: get there, find the object, photograph it. Curiosity opened the loop. The trip closed it.
CD2: Development & Accomplishment shows up the moment you find a page, and Decoded handled this drive in a way Eye-Spy could not. Finding a page was a personal trophy. You had a photo. You had a story. You had a small unique piece of an artifact almost no one else had touched. That gives the accomplishment a flavor of CD4: Ownership & Possession too, even though most players did not literally own the page. They owned the moment of finding it, and the photographic proof of that moment was a kind of badge that lived on their feeds and in their group texts for months.
CD6: Scarcity & Impatience is the quiet drive in this recipe. There were only so many copies of each page. Once a page was found, the chase was on for the next one. The campaign produced a felt urgency that Eye-Spy never tried to produce. Eye-Spy did not need urgency. Decoded did, because cultural PR loves a deadline.
The recipe is wider, deeper, more expensive than Eye-Spy’s, and it had to be. The goal was reposition, not engagement. Bing wanted to be the search engine that could carry a Cannes-worthy creative project. Random House wanted Decoded reviewed in cultural sections. Both got what they paid for.
The two recipes side by side, weighted exactly as described above.
What Both Got Right
Despite different recipes, both campaigns share three traits that I think every gamified marketing brief should adopt.
The first is that both teams started from the goal. Eye-Spy started with Facebook engagement. Decoded started with cultural PR. Neither team started with “let’s gamify this.” That order matters more than people realize. Most bad gamified campaigns start with the mechanic (“we’ll do a hunt”) and reverse-engineer a goal to fit it. The result is a campaign that looks gamified and feels flat, because the recipe was chosen for its taste rather than for what the meal needed to do.
The second is that both teams matched the recipe to the platform’s actual physics. Facebook in 2012 rewarded shares and comments on a single post. Eye-Spy was a single post engineered for shares and comments. The physical world in 2010 rewarded surprising real-life moments that became dinner-party stories. Decoded was a tour of surprising real-life moments. The medium was not an afterthought. The medium decided which Core Drives could even appear.
The third is that both teams accepted the cost of their goal. Eye-Spy’s goal was cheap to chase, so the campaign was cheap. Decoded’s goal was expensive (city-by-city stunts, Cannes-grade creative, Bing Maps integration, Jay-Z’s time and equity), so the campaign was expensive. Trying to get Decoded outcomes on an Eye-Spy budget is a category error you see in marketing decks every quarter, and it never works.
What Each Got Wrong (and What That Teaches Marketers)
Now the honest part. I have seen both campaigns get held up as templates for years, and I think both have ceilings worth naming.
Eye-Spy’s ceiling is that the campaign died with the flavor. The pretzel M&M is now a permanent product, but the Eye-Spy moment is gone. There was no community built around the brand. There was no second act. There was no reason for a player to come back to M&M after the loop closed. CD7 is a strong opener and a weak closer. Curiosity gets you in the door, but if there is nothing behind the door except “you found it,” the relationship ends in seconds. Many marketers see Eye-Spy’s traffic numbers and assume the campaign built brand affinity. It built attention spikes. Attention spikes are not affinity. The lesson: if you want a campaign to compound past the first viral wave, your recipe needs at least one drive from the long-game side of Octalysis (CD1, CD4, CD5 done as community rather than share). Eye-Spy did not need that. Most campaigns do.
Decoded’s ceiling is that it is hard to repeat. The 2010 conditions that made it work are gone. Bing had a budget and a competitive desperation against Google that funded the integration. Jay-Z had a specific moment of cultural weight tied to a memoir release. The Internet had not yet collapsed every promotion into the same algorithmic feed, so an offline scavenger hunt could become a cultural conversation in newspapers, on late-night TV, and on a thousand still-active blogs. Anyone trying to make Decoded again now has to fight social platforms that flatten earned media into ten-second clips, a celebrity equity market that has fractured across creators, and a budget environment that is meaner than 2010’s. The lesson: a pre-Instagram, pre-TikTok, pre-algorithm campaign is not a template. It is a snapshot of a media environment that no longer exists. You can still pull the CD1 plus CD5 plus CD7 recipe forward. You cannot pull the conditions forward.
Where both campaigns share a failure mode, it is the seductive idea that the mechanic is the lesson. The mechanic is not the lesson. “Hide a thing and ask people to find it” is a mechanic. Recipes are the lesson. M&M’s recipe and Jay-Z’s recipe sit on opposite ends of Octalysis even though the surface verb (find) is identical. Take Eye-Spy’s verb to a Decoded-style goal and it will not work. Take Decoded’s verb on an Eye-Spy budget and it collapses on contact with reality.
How to Pick Your Octalysis Recipe for Your Campaign
Here is the small exercise I run with workshop teams before they brief a gamified campaign. It takes about twenty minutes if you are honest about your answers.
Step one: name the actual goal in one sentence. Not “engagement.” Not “buzz.” Not “awareness.” Force yourself to say what specifically should change in the world in 90 days because of this campaign. “Drive 2 million Facebook shares and comments around the launch flavor in a 6-week window” is a goal. “Reposition Bing as a search engine creative directors take seriously” is a goal. “Be cool” is not a goal.
Step two: name the platform’s physics. What does the platform reward, today, in 2025 onward? TikTok rewards rewatch and stitchable formats. Instagram Reels rewards saves and DMs. LinkedIn rewards comment threads from named experts. Each platform has a fingerprint, and the fingerprint maps to a small set of Core Drives that the platform’s algorithm makes visible. The physics decides which drives can even appear in your recipe.
Step three: pick two heavy drives and one or two light drives, and write down what each is doing. The Eye-Spy recipe is CD7 heavy, CD2 light, CD5 light. The Decoded recipe is CD1 heavy, CD5 heavy, CD7 medium, CD2 medium, CD6 light. You should be able to write your own recipe in the same format. If you cannot, you do not yet have a campaign. You have a list of mechanics.
Step four: stress-test the recipe by removing one drive at a time. Take your CD7 out. Does the campaign still produce the goal? If yes, your CD7 was decoration. Take your CD1 out. Does the cultural piece collapse? If yes, your CD1 is load-bearing. The drives that survive this test are your real recipe. Everything else is varnish, and varnish is what makes a campaign feel gamified-but-flat.
Step five: cost-check. The recipe should be priced to its goal. CD1-heavy campaigns cost more, take longer, and need celebrity, narrative, or social cause underneath them. CD7-only campaigns are cheaper, faster, shorter-lived. Both are legitimate. Both are wrong if mismatched to the goal.
Run that exercise on your next brief and you will catch the mismatch before the agency invoice does. The Eye-Spy and Decoded contrast is a clean training pair because both worked, both are well-documented, and both teach a different half of the lesson. Pick the right half for the campaign in front of you, and the recipe almost designs itself.
For deeper reads on the drives that show up in both campaigns, the dedicated CD7 Unpredictability & Curiosity and CD5 Social Influence & Relatedness pages walk through the techniques each one uses. The marketing gamification hub adds newer cases as they hold up.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework
- Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity
- Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness
- Marketing Gamification Hub
- Actionable Gamification (Book)