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In Code
By: Tama Swan, Associate Editor
Issue: 2010jun
Likely the future’s product imprint du jour, 2-D barcodes are popping up all over.
You might have spied them on store fronts, in magazines or on t-shirts. The black-and-white coded messages give little indication as to what they are or why they’re there, but they beckon you to check them out nonetheless.
Often called 2-D barcodes, but also known as quick response (QR) codes or mobile tags, they’re the newest playthings for marketing executives.
Indicative of the growing influence smart phones have on our culture, reading these barcodes requires an internet-enabled phone loaded with a code reader application. A quick scan of the code reveals the specific content the code holds.
“Over the next two years, the smart phone growth that’s projected is going to be insane,” says Nick Ford, co-founder of TappInn, Inc., a QR-code marketing firm that creates codes and builds product-specific websites to which the codes link. “Everything is changing. I go in and search code reader apps in the Apple Store and there are new ones every day. Every day new smart-phone users are born.”
Marketers’ interest lies in how the codes can bridge the advertising gap between web content and the physical world. “Print is really the media that’s missing that clickability,” Ford says, adding that the codes are the gateway to more digital content.
In a time when advertisers are rushing to create an online presence and demanding quantifiable ROI, mobile codes may be the best bet for imprinted promotional products.
“There are a lot of different tracking features that you get along with a code,” says Cheryl Becker, MAS, southeast regional sales manager for Shawnee Mission, Kansas-based supplier Gill Studios, Inc. (UPIC: gill). “When you create the code you can make it URL-driven to take it to a website, or if it’s a note code you can make it capture all of the info that’s on a printed product.”
In fact, the list of functions for 2-D barcodes also includes call codes that send phone numbers to the users’ smart phones, e-mail codes, lotto codes that link to a winning or losing URL, contact codes that load info into a phone’s address book and calendar codes that mark a specific date.
Before smart phones brought 2-D codes to the masses, companies such as Toyota and FedEx used them to track inventory and packages. Last December, Google sent out more than 100,000 barcode-emblazoned window stickers to identify the most popular businesses in its local business directory. Despite widespread consumer use in Japan, many pinpoint Google’s rollout of the codes as the moment at which they began to get noticed in the U.S.
“I introduced this at the Geiger Galleria over a year ago, and people weren’t ready for it,” recalls Becker. “They didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand how to use it, how to sell it. And things have changed a lot in the last year.”
Indeed, mobile was the only type of media that saw user growth in 2009. The amount of time per day that U.S. consumers spend with mobile media increased 39 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, according to research firm the Yankee Group.
The promotional products 2-D barcodes are suited for more than stickers and other paper products; functioning codes can be screen printed, embroidered, knitted—even formed in icing on a cupcake.
For brand-conscious companies that would like to embed a signature logo into a code, Ford warns this limits the amount of information the code can hold. “I could put a logo in the middle of a QR code,” he says, “but the QR code wouldn’t be able to store the data that it would need to get the unique web page that we want to track. If you just wanted a basic landing page you could manipulate the code.”
However, Ford predicts the time will come when marketers can make codes unique and still maintain the campaign’s integrity and track users. “When QR codes blow up there are going to be niches upon niches of stuff,” he says.
THERE’S MORE ONLINE
Peruse a gallery of campaigns that feature 2-D barcodes here.
Learning To Read
Before a smart phone user can access the unique content built into a 2-D barcode, he or she must first download a code reader application. The four most popular readers in Apple’s iTunes store are Quick Mark, Optiscan, quiQR and ScanLife, most of which come in multiple versions for different phones.
Because there are different types of codes and no generally excepted standard, the best code readers work in multiple formats.
Above: From left to right: Microsoft tag, QR code, data matrix code and EZ code
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