11/02/11
They are cropping up everywhere! Those little codes, you’re supposed to scan with your smart phone (after you’ve downloaded the app) that leads you to a website or a coupon or the next step of a treasure hunt. Let’s face it; most consumers in the higher income earning brackets don’t give a hoot about taking the time to scan one of those cryptic looking bar codes in the corner of the advertisement, and most recently appearing on your favorite news reports.
These codes have become obnoxiously present on advertising, in the corner of print ads, billboards (now that’s a driving hazard), buses and pieces of direct mail, and who knows what next. These code make advertisements look disjointed with an ugly scan code. There is really no way to make it work with a piece of persuasion art. However, the technology for QR Codes wasn’t developed for advertising. Can you say, “novelty over function”?
Unless, we in the advertising world can come up with a creative way to use these things for conversions or persuasion, then they may just go the way of the Pterodactyl. A recent blog by Sean X. Cummings, a longtime digital marketing guru, for such major brands as Nike and American Airlines, cited an informal experiment he conducted on the tech savvy streets of San Francisco. He basically held up a sign with a QR Code on it that said; “ free gift if you can tell me what this says.” After 300 people passed him, only 11% bothered to scan the code with their smart phone QR Reader application and collect their gift.
The moral of the story is; should advertising really be cryptic? Should we make our target market work so darned hard to get our message? Can we really expect out target consumers to take that kind of time to retrieve advertisers messages? I doubt it.
