QR Codes: Often a Gimmick in Advertisements

Shortly after my parents and I moved to the suburbs in the East San Francisco Bay Area in 1997, the popularity of the World Wide Web was picking up speed.  It was not long before my father signed up for the Internet service provider America Online.  My father and I were intrigued with the amount of information that we could conveniently access.  Neither of us cared that AOL used the telephone lines, blocking us from sending or receiving phone calls; the amount of new things that we could do made it worthwhile.  (Even though my mother, who did not use the computer at all, let alone the Web, felt that the blocking of phone calls was troublesome.)

Followed was the popularity of the term “.com” in advertisements.  In 1997, having a ”.com” seemed like a big deal, as websites with their own domain names were associated almost exclusively with major businesses who had the resources and the infrastructure to risk building on to a new and rapidly-growing, but uncertain, platform. 

Now in 2013, just about anything can have a domain name, from upcoming films which are soon to be forgotten, to small family businesses.  This brings us to QR codes—they are functionally similar to URLs or Web addresses, but take less room on, for example, a poster.  In a sense, QR codes combine the compactness and machine readability of UPCs (bar codes) and the flexibility of URLs.

The advantage of machine readability is particularly important, since it leads to my overall opinion of QR codes.  QR codes that are meant to be scanned on humans are often a gimmick; the people who can scan these QR codes are people with smartphones, who are also people who can simply type a URL and go to the relevant website directly (although longer URLs can justifiably be replaced with a QR code).  QR codes can be overused to a fault [1] [2].  As I said before, QR codes in advertisements and magazines are gimmicky and could easily be replaced with URLs, and as a person who is mindful of where to go online, I often do not want to blindly go to a webpage or have my phone do anything that I would not expect it to do, so I have no interest in scanning them.  Since advertisements have been advertising their Web content long before QR codes even entered popular use, QR codes may quickly lose their novelty, as they do not offer nearly as much as domain names did in 1997.

Most productive uses of QR codes are instead in East Asia, where QR codes are being used for transit tickets, identification documents, and visas [3].  If the western world does not adopt the practical uses of QR codes that East Asia has, then it may only be a matter of time before the general public writes QR codes off as a fad.