If you own a smart phone you’ve probably downloaded, or at least seen, “an app for that” which allows you to read bar codes on your phone. You can read the old-fashioned UPC style bar code on your phone and instantly compare prices of any product from any store on the web.
Now, some intelligent marketers have started inserted the 2D, or QR, bar codes into everything from magazine ads to business cards. Since the 2D bar codes can hold much more data than the old-style bar codes marketers have much more flexibility to link to websites, blogs, audio, and video which turns a static magazine ad into an interactive playground.
What’s cool about implementing this into your marketing campaign is that you can track how many times your bar code has been scanned and in some instances, by whom and their exact location on the planet.
Sounds like an absolute win for marketers. But hold on….
One of the only but very major reasons you don’t see this type of integration into EVERY ad you see is because only a small percentage of the population owns a smart phone. And those that do are not accustomed to pulling it out and scanning a page “for more interactive information”.
But at least the technology is there and over time we will probably see more and more 2D bar codes embedded into ads.
So, I’d like to know if you have ever used this technology into your marketing campaigns. Or perhaps you’ve seen a lot of these bar codes in the newspapers or magazines you read regularly. Let me know in the comment section below.
