David Emery OnlineThe futility of QR codes on Tube adverts
25 August 2011
Travelling on the London Underground ‘Tube’ recently I have noticed that more and more adverts have a QR code, I am not too sure if this is a recent phenomena or that I have been paying more attention as a number of the projects that I’ve been recently looking at are about the ‘web of no web’: the interface between the web and the real world. I am a big fan of progressive approaches to marketing, however, the more I thought about the phenomena, the greater the waste of time that it seemed to be.
The explosion of QR codes on adverts, almost all of which are completely useless, really does show how little some advertisers think through what they’re doing.
I particularly like the ones I regularly see on the large posters on the other side of the track on tube platforms, which are almost always too far away to work – are you supposed to jump onto the rails to scan a QR code to visit some movies Facebook page? And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s displayed in one of the only places left 100% guaranteed not to have any form of internet connection…
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