What are QR codes?

If you’re reading this from Japan, you’re going to roll your eyes at me being Betty Rubble and living in Bedrock over here, but I’m getting intrigued by QR codes and am praying for their widespread adoption in Canada sometime soon.

Print advertising—magazines, direct mail, transit—has always engendered a sinking feeling of futility in my conversion-sensitive stomach. Creative teams bust their balls to conceive and execute an idea meant to motivate an audience to do something, but the disconnect between seeing an ad and acting on it is just hopelessly huge in these attention-starved times. I am just not going to go home and type in a URL I saw on a billboard. I don’t remember it and I don’t care about it anymore by the time I’ve got the leisure to look it up.

Groovy little portals to the future

Enter the QR code, a simple bar code readable by any phone with a camera & a scanner App. Spy a code on a flyer, tv show, magazine or poster & with a quick wave of your cell, you’re whisked to a mobile site providing the instant opportunity to:

• Make a donation to a cause
• Buy tickets to an event
• Watch a movie trailer, documentary clip, or interview
• Like a Facebook page
• Enter a contest
• Get a map
• Download an app
• Read current information about a person, place or thing
• Pay for stuff
  

Wow, hey? No more barriers to conversion. Act now while you’re in the mood! The best example I read, and I’m pretty sure this is fantasy island stuff except in Jetsonsesque Japan, was the ability to stand around a movie store scanning boxes and watching movie trailers. I’m not sure there’ll be movie stores by the time this technology is widespread in North America, but you get the picture. Literally, ha.

QR Code 101: the Basics

Here are some neato things I’ve learned about QR codes.

• QR codes link real world objects (anything that can be printed on or scotch-taped to or broadcast) to online destinations
• A link from the real world to the internet is called a hardlink, which sounds cool
• The practice of using these things is called mobile tagging
• QR codes are free and easy to generate
• Codes can link to a URL, or decode into text, a phone number (which on the iPhone at least, calls the number), or an SMS
• QR codes are not secure, so don’t put your freakin’ secrets on ‘em
• Your phone needs an App to read codes
• In Japan, phones come with scanner Apps. That’s kind of the holdup in North America
• Your phone can read a code off a computer, tv screen, or LCD/LED billboard, along with printed codes
• Designers: the white space around a code is part of the code. Don’t be croppin’ it

While the code reading experience is nifty, and marketers’ll be able to capitalize on sheer novelty for a while, the mobile experience the person is taken to is 80% of the interaction. You must not suck here. You must not make someone drag out there phone to get “more”, and give them less (ie, your not-even-a-mobile-site-totally-normal-website. That would be bad).

At the very least have your website streamlined for mobile by a cool interactive agency. With 23,000,000 mobile phones in Canada, this is gonna become an issue shortly anyway.

Not having encountered QR codes in Winnipeg, I couldn’t imagine why such a groovy, futuristic technology that finally, finally married the internet to real life wasn’t super enormous, so I asked cool Toronto QR agency QRe8 what’s going on. I hope to have an interview with them up shortly.