Mindfully.org note:
Northwest Airlines is harnessing Japan's love of gadgets to open a new frontier in interactive advertising: tempting consumers to access prizes and games by scanning giant bar codes with their cellphone cameras.
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Mindfully.org note:
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In its latest Tokyo outdoor campaign, Northwest Airlines, the fourth-largest U.S. airline by traffic, is covering the city's billboards and subway stations with ads containing the bar codes, which look like huge geometric Rorschach tests. The ads taunt passersby to unlock a message hidden inside the square of black and white pixels called a QR code, which requires a special reader to decode.
Sound complicated? Not in Japan where already some 30 million people carry the special readers around, tucked inside their cellphones. With a snapshot, the information is decoded, directing the phone's Web browser to coupons, games or further details on a product.
QR codes have grown in popularity in Japan over the past year, showing up thumbnail size on magazine and newspaper ads as a quick automatic link between print and online media that doesn't require the customer to type in an Internet address or remember a special code. Similar attempts in the U.S. haven't caught on, probably because the scanners aren't built into an existing gadget.
The Northwest campaign, created by WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather ad agency and Mindshare media buying unit, takes Japan's QR code phenomenon to a new extreme, blowing up codes to heights as great as 10 meters, or 33 feet. At first, Ogilvy wasn't even sure if the QR technology would work at such a huge scale, so it conducted tests from multiple angles.
But what might seem a hassle to consumers in other countries is a treat for tech-curious Japanese, says Ogilvy's Yusuke Mitsumoto, who directed the campaign.
"It is like a toy gadget," he says. "People will wonder whether this works and will stop to photograph it."
The unique ways in which the Japanese use cellphones as portable computers have helped ad agencies in Japan stay two steps ahead of Madison Avenue on the technology front. Last year, for the first time, Japanese advertisers spent more money on online marketing, including cellphones and the Internet, than they did on radio ads — some $1.6 billion.
Now, after observing that many Japanese surf cellphone Web sites while watching television, agency Dentsu Inc. has been working on a technology that allows cellphones to communicate directly with TV sets, instantly linking sofa surfers with more information about products.
For Northwest, of St. Paul, Minnesota — which last month filed for bankruptcy protection in the face of high labor costs, soaring oil prices and intense competition — the campaign is a chance to boost its Japanese presence and its reputation as a technology leader. Last year, Northwest spent about $6 million on advertising in audited Japanese media, which excludes outdoor. The company declined to say how much it was spending on the QR code campaign.
The first ads, launched in Ginza and the Shinjuku subway station last week, will show in 10 locations before the end of the month. One billboard ad on the side of a building in Tokyo's Ginza business district features the oversize QR code with the headline "The more smarts you have, the more you benefit," a verbal play in Japanese. Consumers who snap a photo of the code with their phones are taken to a special, shrunk-down mobile version of Northwest's Web site, which features a game in which players can win coupons for flights.
It is too early to judge the success of the Northwest campaign, and the airline won't say exactly how many people have scanned in the giant codes. But the company's Japan marketing manager, Toshifumi Miyoshi, says the response to the campaign is "much higher" than a mobile campaign it tried three years ago, even accounting for increasing numbers of cellphone users.
A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are most common in Japan, and are currently the most popular type of two dimensional code in Japan.
Although initially used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR Codes are now used for inventory management in a wide variety of industries. More recently, the inclusion of QR Code reading software on camera phones in Japan has led to a wide variety of new, consumer-oriented applications, aimed at relieving the user of the tedious task of entering data into their mobile phone. QR Codes storing addresses and URLs are becoming increasingly common in magazines and advertisements in Japan. The addition of QR Codes on business cards is also becoming common, greatly simplifying the task of entering the personal details of a new acquaintance into the address book of one's mobile phone.
Consumers with capture programs and a PC with an RS-232C-interface may use a scanner to acquire the data.
The Japanese standard for QR Codes, JIS X 0510, was released in January of 1999, and a corresponding ISO International Standard, ISO/IEC18004, was approved in June of 2000.
"QR Code is open in the sense that the specification of QR Code is disclosed and that the patent right owned by Denso Wave is not exercised."—from the Denso-Wave website
QR Code Data capacity
Numeric only Max. 7,089 characters
Alphanumeric Max. 4,296 characters
Binary (8 bits) Max. 2,953 bytes
Kanji/Kana Max. 1,817 characters
Error Correction capacity
Level L 7% of codewords can be restored.
Level M 15% of codewords can be restored.
Level Q 25% of codewords can be restored.
Level H 30% of codewords can be restored.
Micro QR Code is a smaller version of the QR Code standard for applications with less ability to handle large scans.
There are different forms of Micro QR Code as well. The highest of these can hold 35 characters.
NFGman demonstrated how one could turn virtually anything into a QR
Code by transforming a 1.5k (kilobyte) PNG file into an 8-part QR. This can be found here.
QR Code Official English Site
Programs For Compiling QR Codes (Trial)
Report on
QR-codes for mobile phones in Japan (Pay to view PDF)
Online QR Code generators
[1] http://nfg.2y.net/system/qrcodegen.php
[2] http://www.pukupi.com/tools/codeatron/
This page was last modified 22:16, 25 August 2005.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code
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