This afternoon in the Hilton, Cara Chirichella of Macmillan, Antony McGregor Dey of link.me, Kulveer Taggar of Tagstand and Daniel Switkin of Google to discuss the current state of QR code and NFC adoption, as well as best practices and future possibilities.
For QR codes, Mr. McGregor Dey gave two examples of failed deployments. One was the recent GoDaddy TV ads. QR codes don’t work well on TV because they are not on the screen long enough and people tend to sit too far away to scan them. Similarly, on billboards people tend to be too far away, and also link.me’s research has shown that many people feel silly scanning them in public. As an example of a good use case, they put QR codes on book jackets for selected published books. Scanning the code took the user to supplemental content relating to the book. In a sense, this content functioned as “DVD Extras” for the printed book.
Meanwhile, QR codes can be read by 200+ apps across all the major platforms, and these apps have been installed over 40 million times. In addition, there are plans for AT&T to build native support into some future handsets.
Mr. Taggar discussed a case study of an NFC campaign in India for Nokia. The Finnish device maker deployed 20,000 pieces of tagged collateral to mobile shops across the country in the hopes of promoting their handsets with NFC capabilities. Nokia used the Tagstand Manager to control where each of those tags drove to. The results were very encouraging; Nokia sold out of their stock of NFC-capable phones in India.
