Barcode Talk

The neighbours might not like it but, if the mortgage payments are getting too much, why not turn your house into a billboard?

The housing crisis has led the US marketing company Brainiacs From Mars to offer homeowners the opportunity to have their mortgage paid for up to a year in return for advertising space. Romeo Mendoza, the founder and CEO of Brainiacs From Mars, aims to progress the scheme until at least 1,000 houses across the United States have been turned into giant advertisements for his marketing firm, each incorporating media marketing tools such as a huge QR code.

There’s more than marketing to the gimmick; Mendoza says he chooses the most deserving cases rather than homes on the busiest streets. Either way, it seems nothing is immune to the QR code and, if this example is anything to go by, we may all soon have to decide whether our cars, briefcases and who knows what else should be earning us money.

Read the full article here.

CEO of Brainiacs From Mars, Romeo Mendoza stands outside the Hostetler home

All those who bemoan the lack of imagination in the use of QR codes need look no further than here for a little comfort.

This usage is not only creative with an element of humour but potentially educates its audience as to what a QR code is and how it works.  It also underlines the sound functionality of QR codes since, even rendered in Lego, this code does actually work (which, as the blogger writes, even surprised its maker).

Here’s a novel use of QR. The story at the other end of this link will certainly get you thinking, though it poses as many questions as it provides answers:

The problem: US newspaper survey reveals that nearly half of the fish provided to customers of restaurants and supermarkets in the Boston area were not the same species that they ordered.

The answer: QR codes, used by a network of fishermen, distributors, processors and restaurants, which can track individual fish from the ocean to your plate.

How can you trace every batch of fish caught with a QR code? And what does the chef do with the barcode? Stick it on the edge of your plate when the fish is served up?

Now even aliens can get in on the QR act, assuming that, like Steven Spielberg’s cute extra-terrestrial, they understand how to use a phone.  It’s all thanks to Blue Marble™, which is offering businesses the opportunity to transform their rooftops into billboards containing QR codes that can be seen from space.  Of course, the prime focus of the endeavour is to help businesses promote themselves via leading navigation applications like Google Earth® and Google Maps® but, should those little green men from Mars wish to start trading with our businesses and boost the economy in 2012, we won’t turn them away.

QR continues to get a rough ride from journalists and bloggers who claim that these codes are not suitable for advertising and marketing, that the public don’t understand them, and that there is little creativity in their usage. A recent example comes from commentator Sean X Cummins:

Click here to read the full article or scan the QR code with your smartphone

Cummins conducted an informal street survey that challenged participants to correctly identify and put a name to the QR code and, while the venture revealed some amusing responses from those who interpreted the little black blocks as hypnotic 3D images or coded messages used by the military, 40% of those canvassed did successfully recognise the image as a QR or bar code.

Cummins is right to question the use of QR codes on moving buses and roadside billboards given that the majority of those canvassed were not yet sufficiently ‘quick on the draw’ to gather information from such locations but, despite the negative angle of the article, it seems that awareness of QR is growing apace. And, as all observers of modern technology know, when the tipping point is reached between novelty and accepted norm, the scales can move very, very fast.

Frequent fliers with Scandinavian airline SAS will soon be able to enjoy quicker check-in and boarding using contactless stickers.  50,000 of the operator’s most loyal customers are to be issued with the stickers to attach to the back of their phone.  Tapping them on readers at boarding gates will automatically transmit the owner’s membership number, enabling airline staff to call up their flight details more quickly.

Kristine Mayer, strategic project manager at SAS and project manager of the Smart Pass service, said, “It is a natural step to use the mobile phone to identify the journey through the airport because it one of the items that passengers have easily accessible when travelling.”

Click here to read the full article

First, viewers were invited to write in with a stamped addressed envelope and request a leaflet, then websites published details.  Now QR codes are making the job of gathering instructions and lists of ingredients for recipes on cookery programmes even simpler.  BBC show The Good Cook has begun floating a QR code after demonstrating how to prepare each dish, enabling viewers to download recipes there and then.  Suddenly, seeking out a recipe at a website belonging to another cookery programme that does not offer a QR code seems an effort, particularly when there is no guarantee that it will be there at all…

Screen shot from 'The Good Cook'

Marketing Week presented a bleak picture of QR this month but, reading between the lines, they’re really only saying what we’ve said here already, which is that capitalising on QR is not just a matter of slapping a code on a mail shot and waiting for customers to come running.

Click here to read the article

Although only a minority of respondents to the market research survey quoted in Marketing Week claimed to understand QR, almost half of those canvassed were very positive about the technology.  The real story, as touched on towards the end of the article, is that marketers need to educate and inform consumers about their purpose rather than simply adding QR codes to their products and their advertising campaigns.

Interestingly, in the paper copy of the magazine this article sits opposite an advert for “booqi”, a system that uses webcam and some special software to scan a card or bit of marketing material and then ‘recognise’ the media via booqi’s website.  Seems a complicated job, particularly when viewed alongside an article that claims many of us still haven’t grasped the far simpler concept of QR.

The QR debate continues to rage on.  Some disregard it, some are evangelical about it, but, whatever your opinion of QR, the ongoing conversation continues to throw up some interesting views and ideas, such as those contained in this piece by David Meerman Scott:

Click here to read the article

While Scott doesn’t claim that QR codes will have the same uptake as websites or Twitter, he argues the case for using the codes as a marketing tool, not least because they appeal to our geeky streak (a growing affliction now that items such as smart phones are so ubiquitous).

David Meerman Scott describes himself as a practitioner of ‘thought leadership’ and, though this title may sound disturbingly Orwellian, he certainly has some useful, positive ideas for QR, such as popping a code onto a slide in your next presentation, enabling members of your audience to download supplemental information, instead of burdening them with hard-copy handouts.  Scott also has a creative attitude to QR; one of his intentionally provocative suggestions is for geeky singles who wants to meet other geeky singles to wear QR codes that send prospective dates some interesting web-based information about themselves so they can get to know each other sooner.  Could this be taking the term ‘quick response’ a little too far?