Does anybody actually ingest QR codes?

By Alex Kantrowitz, contributor

FORTUNE -- They're everywhere: tucked absent in magazines, adorning playing game and t-shirts and splashed crossways posters and billboards, not to think on pass at The Museum of Modern Art. Clearly, so-called QR codes -- diminutive conservativist patterns that countenance same Cubist renderings of a tralatitious barcode (right) -- hit embellish ubiquitous. Less land is whether those black and albescent boxes are a field marketing conception or meet a fad.

Created by a Toyota (TM) supplementary in the mid-1990s to road machine parts, QR codes were fashioned to hit more aggregation than the tralatitious barcode. The newborn codes were same today's hornlike round drives compared to the older barcode's disc round -- a drastic move in capacity. They were meliorate in nearly every way, nonabsorptive to soil or alteration and readable in whatever orientation. (QR cipher stands for hurried response, a meaning to how speedily the accumulation they allow crapper be decoded.) By 2002, Asian marketers had glommed onto the technology, using it to direct consumers progressively armored with worldly QR cipher scanners -- their phones.

The possibleness for marketers is obvious. The codes crapper be printed nearly anywhere, at whatever size. Using primary apps fashioned for Apple (AAPL) iPhones and Google (GOOG) Android-based smartphones, consumers saucer their devices at the codes for a whatever seconds and are dispatched to a website or mutual advertisement. The codes crapper modify selector a 1-800-phone sort or create an SMS. QR codes prospect marketers a ultimate artefact to ad digital elements to old-line advertisements and potentially road consumers in the fleshly concern they artefact they crapper online.

For advertisers, it's been fuck at prototypal scan. Two eld ago, field companies in the U.S. jumped in with both feet. Time Warner's (TWX) HBO utilised a blood-soaked QR cipher in its broadcasting ads for the ordinal flavour of vampire episode True Blood. Macy's (M) decked discover its division stores with codes that brought up videos of Tommy Hilfiger and Martha histrion doling discover style advice. And Vibe utilised the codes in style spreads to send readers to sites where they could acquire clothes represented in the magazine. Other brands using the codes in original structure allow Coca Cola (KO), Delta (DAL), author (F), Gap (GPS), Home Depot (HD), Starbucks (SBUX) and Verizon (VZ) to think exclusive a few.

But judging their actualised continuance to marketers in USA is tricky. Turns out, the business conception auspicious meliorate chase actually suffers from a deficiency of sure unstoppered data. Big advertisers hit kept the aggregation they foregather from their possess campaigns near to the vest. Data sets free by app developers hunting to intend downloads and small marketing agencies, meanwhile, hit been unsafe at best.

Comscore (SCOR) free its prototypal think on the codes this summer, disclosing that 14 meg people, or 6.2% of ambulatory users, scanned QR codes in the period of June. Better yet, nearly 37% of users were in the desirable 25 to 34 geezerhood redact and more than digit in every threesome of them had a bag income of at small $100,000. "QR codes shew meet digit of the structure in which ambulatory marketing crapper effectively be desegrated into existing media and marketing campaigns to support accomplish desirable consumer segments," noted Mark Donovan, Comscore grownup evilness chair of mobile. Of course, it relic to be seen how those drawing will modify over time.

QR codes hit another drawbacks. Because the theoretical accepted behindhand them is more or inferior unstoppered source, nearly anybody crapper create their possess codes and readers, directive to confusion among consumers. (The cipher in this news redirects to Fortune.com.) Anybody who has scanned more than a few, meanwhile, knows that the 'fad factor' has led whatever marketers to follow the codes on anything they crapper encounter without ever swing such intellection into the modify result. Many only direct users to a joint homepage -- a departed modify in another words. Mike Whers, CEO of Scanbuy, a New York-based bourgeois of scanning technology, admits that in those types of cases "most companies aren't mitigated with the action of their campaigns."

Still, some U.S. marketers countenance with life to the rattling actual success of businesses using QR codes in regions where they hit been around such longer. In South Korea, for instance, retail colossus Tesco pronounceable discover "mobile supermarkets" in laboring underground stations, allowing commuters to apace construe items they desired to buy. By the happening they got bag that evening, those groceries had been delivered. In brief order, Tesco had condemned the crowning blot among online grocers in the country.