The other day, I saw an ad for Polo Ralph Lauren on the back of my NY mag, featuring one of those bar codes that I believed had never crossed the Japanese borders. Since I’m a sucker for marketing experimentations, plus I’ve been wondering about these for a while, I decided to give it a try. I grabbed the magazine and my iPhone, ready to dive in the wonderful world of real-life shortcuts to the Internet!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky. It took me 15 minutes to go from that ad to where Ralph wanted to take me. A quarter of an hour when I had to struggle with broken web pages and far-from-optimized layouts. For an insulting result… being sent to the site’s homepage! The 21 steps I had to take are detailed in the slideshow above.
I know, we need to be “educated” before actually seeing some interesting marketing applications, but you can only make one first impression. So please, marketers, if you want consumers to use new technologies like QR codes, make sure you make it effortless for us. Because it’s gonna take a while before I take a picture of one of these again! And dear people at Polo’s Interactive Marketing Department, if you need an agency that can develop a gorgeous, premium, advanced iPhone/mobile-optimized site, drop us a line and we’ll give you a sneak preview of a pretty awesome example we’re about to launch for one of our client!
That’s crazy!
Vespa’s campaign in Toronto was better I think: http://www.haroeverybody.com/vespa-qr/
I started playing around with QR Codes a month ago and it’s really not ready for “big advertising campaigns”. There’s no websites officialy explaining what are QR codes, how to read them and how to make them. You have to spend hours on google. The best website I found is http://reader.kaywa.com/ but there is no support for iphones. For iphones, like you said there are four readers and they’re all different. Some work, some don’t. Some support QR codes others don’t. Lighting as to be perfect and since the apps can’t directly access the iphone’s camera, it takes forever to read a QR code. For other smatphones, it’s quite easy to read them. But getting the people to download the reader that’s right for their phone is complicated. There’s more than 10 readers supporting different phones and carriers on the web.
I think a big company (Google, Apple, etc..) needs to take a look at that problem and develop something that would work for everybody.
I totally agree there were some initial poor ‘UI’ decisions being made on the Ralph Lauren campaign.
BTW have you seen how they implemented storefront QR codes for their New York Rugy brand store http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/ralph-lauren-physical-storefront-qr.html
Having said this QR codes are a huge boon to PWC. Check out www.Cognation.net/QR for some ideas on how else to implement QR codes.
Regards,
Dean Collins
www.Cognation.net
Point taken! I’m a marker for Jim Beam and we use 2D codes in our campaign for http://www.thestuffinside.com. We tried to make the experience as easy as possible. But the iPhone is a different animal and since the web browser is so good they should have pointed to a regular sized html site instead of a mobile site.
If you visit m.thestuffinside.com on your web browsers you’ll see that it is a small site and create for mobile devices where the screen is 320×240. The iPhone can pretty much support a regular site that doesn’t have flash built into it.
I think in RL case, this was poorly done as I am pretty confident the RL homepage on their mobile site was the destination, but you just never knew it.
In terms of potential for QR-Codes, think how else these can work e.g. reading a newspaper, see a topic about the war highlighting video footage, QR-Code next to piece, scan QR-Code, visit website and view video.
This would truely bring many aspects of offline… online via mobile.
As you highlighted, scanning software is annoying.
Totally agreed, potential is huge, execution still needs to be defined. Especially during adoption phase. It’s tricky since you need consumers to adopt the technology and download the software, so the early adopters should be rewarded!
Scanning software doesn’t have to be difficult to use - if you have an appropriate model handset try Quickmark - it’s what I use after trying about 2 or 3 other software applications.
Cheers,
Dean