What’s a QR code you ask?
It’s the newest way of connecting a company’s messages to its customers. Your mobile phone, almost regardless of what brand or how “Smart” it is, can use these QR codes as a way to find information on the internet about a product or service. All a person needs to do is download a reader application to their phone, scan a QR code, and watch the results come to them. Of course there are things on the network side that have to be in place first, but that’s for the engineers and techs on the backbone of the network to maintain. Once your scan is read, the software in your phone decodes the QR code, activates your browser, and goes to the URL designated by the QR code. What you recieve is whatever the encoder of the QR code wants you to see, whether that’s a video of their newest offering, or an information breakdown. An interesting use of the QR codes has been from Scion, who uses the a QR generated code in a paper steering wheel distributed through magazines and at car shows to use as a control mechanism for a car in a video game. The uses of these QR codes are by no means endless, but I think there is room to see use grow.
Update, March 25, 2012: these things are popping up EVERYWHERE! I mean it makes sense to see them on printed materials, stickers, people’s cars, magazines, and newspapers (except that there has to be a very small overlap between the people who use QR codes and those who read newspapers). But seriously I’ve seen a QR tag displayed on a TV commercial. Who is watching TV with their smartphone out, sees a tag and says, “Ooh, I wonder what that is for?” and proceed to scan the tag with their phone. I’ve also seen one on a billboard, which I can’t work out how in the world that’s supposed to work. My favorite creative use of a QR tag so far has to come from NOS energy drink (a division of Fuze Beverage, LLC) which used a QR on a pillow at one of the drift events I’ve attended.
Despite all this the emergence of tech in advertising is a great thing. Advertisers are able to gather information about the people who their ads are hitting that would not have been able to be gathered at all in some cases. I still think we’re just seeing the beginning of the uses for this technology.
McWheels5 