The Rise and Fall of QR codes

The Rise and Fall of QR codes

I’m guessing that only about 25% of the people reading this today know what a QR code is.

I’ve talked about them in the past and you can see the articles by going here.

What was an up and coming bit of technology is now falling out of favor, it seems.

On a recent Sunday, I was paging through the printed version of the newspaper and found a grand total of TWO QR codes.

One was for a shoe store, the other was for a car dealership.

The shoe store code was a fail, because the link went to their regular webpage which wasn’t mobile friendly.

The car dealership ad said to scan their QR code and Like their Facebook page.  This works…sort of.

The code went to something that was mobile friendly, but I have no reason to Like their Facebook page.

The most ironic ad I saw in the paper was this:

Why isn't there a QR Code?

Why isn’t there a QR Code?

 

The Best Place for a QR Code is?

The Best Place for a QR Code is?

Would you believe magazines?

Last month I wrote about one of the worst places to slap a QR code was a billboard.

I also showed you a QR code that I encountered at the grocery store and explained how to effectively use QR codes at this early stage.

But one of the downfalls of QR Codes is they have to be scan-able

I’ve worked in the print business a few times and as both an insider and a consumer I know that certain publications have poor quality control. Your daily newspaper or some direct mail coupons have sections that are so blurry, no one can read them, let alone a QR code scanner.

Check out this story from Mediapost:

Magazine pages became increasingly popular places for marketers to slap QR codes last year. A survey of the top 100 U.S. magazines by circulation found the number of “mobile action codes” climbed from 352 in the first- quarter issues to 1,899 in the fourth quarter, for a record total of 4,468 in 2011.

The study by mobile marketing firm Nellymoser underscores that advertisers drove the growth of QR codes in magazine. It notes that in January 2011 there were seven advertising codes for each editorial one, and by September, that ratio had jumped to 25:1. The number of magazine titles with at least one action code hit 90% in May for the first time, and rose to 96% in July.

Nellymoser points to the percentage of magazine pages that include QR codes as a better gauge for tracking adoption because the statistic isn’t as likely to be affected by seasonality or skipped issues. The proportion of pages with codes rose steadily from 3.55% in March to 8.36% in December.

The average number of codes per issue roughly tripled in 2011, rising from 2.3 in the first quarter to 6.5 by year’s end. Nearly all of the codes printed in the top 100 magazines in the fourth quarter were either QR codes (72%) or Microsoft Tags (25%).

So how were the codes put to use? The study found that advertisers and editors are no longer creating codes that send readers to a desktop site. Instead, the goal is to engage users with branding campaigns and product demos, m-commerce initiatives, social media and sweepstakes for building customer databases.

More than half (54%) of action codes featured video for showcasing products, offering behind-the-scenes footage or how-to guides. Nearly a third (30%) of codes were used for list-building, 23% enabled sharing a video or product information via social properties, like Facebook and Twitter, and 19% linked to an e-commerce store.

When it came to ad categories, the study showed nearly 40% of the action codes used in magazine advertising came from companies in three industries: beauty, home and fashion. Companies in these segments also led the way in codes placed in retail stores. In the fourth quarter, electronics vendors, such as Bose and Intel, joined the list of top 10 brands in terms of code usage.

The top 10 magazines by circulation accounted for 28% of all codes (1,255), and most of those were titles targeting women, like InStyle and Lucky.

Looking at placement, 90% of codes appeared at the bottom of the page, the traditional place for ads with calls to action. By the fourth quarter, seven out of 10 action codes were accompanied by information that described what happens after the scan. “This is considered by many to be a best practice and follows the pattern of many other calls to action,” according to Nellymoser.

At the same time, the firm noted a shift away from embellishments, with few codes sporting an adjacent icon. It noted that in the second quarter, for example, nearly half of all codes included an instruction for how to download a code reader. That figure had dropped to 23% by the end of 2011. And hardly any codes were accompanied by an SMS campaign for people who did not have action code readers.

.

The Best Place for a QR Code is?

Idiotic QR Coding

Last year I was traveling from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis and somewhere along Interstate 69 there was a billboard with a QR code on it.  Sort of hard to scan when you’re not expecting it and zipping along at 70 miles an hour.

I have no idea who the billboard was advertising.

But recently I noticed this sign:

This was in Fort Wayne, Indiana on Clinton Ave, looking south from Coliseum Blvd.

I decided to pull over and check this out:

This is beyond Idiotic QR Coding.

There are so many things wrong.

The sign does not tell you what to do with the strange black & white design.

(Not everyone is aware of QR codes.)

It is unclear who the sign is for.

In order for me to scan a QR code, it is going to take me a few seconds to pull up the scanner app on my phone, followed by a few seconds to focus my phone scanner on the giant QR code.

I’ve seen this billboard a few other places around town and they all are placed on the wrong side of the intersection.

The sign is across the street from me when I am waiting at a red light and is too far away.

When the QR code is scanable from your car, your car is moving.

Basically it is impossible for anyone to scan this QR code unless they stop their car in a parking lot and waste 5 minutes of their life to see what happens if they use the QR code reader app on their smartphone.

What really burns my britches is this billboard and all the others like it are being funded by my tax dollars.

Your tax dollars too.

The QR code on those signs take you to an Air Force Reserve Blog.  The only positive thing I can say is that it is optimized for mobile.

But the blog is stupid, but that’s another topic for another day.

This is probably a national campaign, and the sales guy at the billboard company didn’t have any say in the “creative design” of the sign, they just took the order and our tax dollars and made a fool out of QR Codes.

Whoever is the brains behind this needs to be fired.