“Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live.”
—What Makes Steve Jobs So Great? | Co. Design
August 2011
11 posts
the stats behind 2-D barcodes
Four percent of magazine readers who noted ads with 2-D barcodes in the first half of this year actually took out their phones and snapped a picture at least once, according to GfK MRI Starch Advertising Research.
Many ads did better, of course: a Porsche ad in Men’s Journal, a Microsoft Office ad in Working Mother and a bedding ad in Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine, all made GfK MRI Starch’s list of the best-performing ads with 2-D barcodes. Among the people who saw the Porsche ad in Men’s Journal, for example, 17% took a picture of its code.
Advertisers hardly need to use a code to get people engaged. By comparison, 14% of people who noticed any magazine ad in the first half of the year responded by visiting the advertiser’s website, presumably primarily through traditional routes such as search engines or the address bar.
2-D barcodes got a better response among men than women: 6% of men who noticed ads with codes photographed at least one in the first half of the year, while 4% of women did the same, GfK MRI Starch found. And younger people were more likely to activate the codes than older people: 6% of readers between 18 to 34 years old who noted ads with the codes took a picture, according to GfK MRI Starch, compared with 3% of people age 35 and up.
Decoded: How Many Readers Use Magazine Ads’ 2-D Barcodes | MediaWorks - Advertising Age
“But those visitors who do use the interactive catalog convert at twice the rate of visitors overall to Hammacher.com.”
—From print to screen: virtual catalogs
“Ecommerce sites replaced catalog shopping, but they didn’t replace catalogs — tablets can do that.”
—Josh Bernoff
