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!