Pepsi QR Promo
They’ve been around for a while so I thought I’d try the huge QR code on the side of a bottle of Diet Pepsi. Clearly they really want people to use it.
I scanned the code with the camera using Neo Reader on my iPhone and found it contained the URL below.
WAP? Am I being transported back to the year 1999? Surely the fact I have a phone with the ability to scan QR codes means I’m highly unlikely to be interested in a WAP experience on my mobile.
Anyway, mustn’t grumble. I pressed continue and got this page.
Oh come on. What’s the point? Why are Pepsi putting such a large QR code on the side of their bottles if it’s delivering people to something like this?
That’s not all. Ignoring the content on offer, if you scroll down to the last option it’s a page about QR codes and what they are.
Why would I need to find out about what a QR code is if I’ve already successfully used one to get me here? Surely the fact I’m looking at this page must mean I know what a QR code is and how to use one.
QR codes could be really useful if they’re used properly but this isn’t useful at all. It’s not even a good marketing campaign.
I know QR codes have a lot of shortcomings. They’re ugly, they need to be quite big, and they’re quite a lot more fiddly than RFID would be to use. The benefit to them is that all they need is a cameraphone capable of decoding them whereas RFID needs specialised hardware to do its thing. The biggest issue with QR codes is really that the software to read them is a bit crap. That said, I’m not convinced that QR codes should be a consumer facing technology at all but I definitely think that if you’re going to do something interesting with them you should probably at least try to make it half decent.
