How QR Code Campaigns Changed Digital Marketing in 2011
The year a Seoul subway platform became a virtual grocery store, Calvin Klein's billboard drew complaints and QR codes proved easier to print than to use well.
2011 was the year QR codes stopped being a novelty confined to early adopters and started showing up on nearly everything, for better and for worse. Smartphone ownership had crossed a threshold where enough consumers could plausibly scan a code that brands stopped treating it as experimental and started treating it as a default addition to almost any print or out-of-home placement: billboards, product packaging, business cards, subway ads, even gravestones and t-shirts got QR codes at some point during the year.
The campaign most people in the industry still point back to came out of South Korea. Tesco’s Homeplus grocery chain, working with the agency Cheil Worldwide, installed posters on Seoul subway platforms designed to look exactly like a grocery store shelf, complete with product photos and a QR code under each item. Commuters waiting for a train could scan products straight into a shopping cart on their phone and have groceries delivered to their home by the time they got there. It won the Grand Prix in the media category at the Cannes Lions advertising festival that year, and it became the case study every agency cited when trying to convince a client that a QR code campaign could do more than link to a homepage. It worked because the code solved a real, immediate problem, shopping during dead time, rather than existing for its own sake.
Not every high-profile 2011 QR campaign landed as well. Calvin Klein put a QR code on a large billboard in New York’s SoHo neighborhood that linked to sexually explicit content, and the placement drew public complaints and press coverage for being visible near a schoolyard and a church, forcing the brand to address the backlash. It became a cautionary example of a broader problem that ran through the year: a QR code could point anywhere, and plenty of brands used that flexibility carelessly, without thinking through who would see the destination or how it reflected on them.
That carelessness showed up in smaller, more common ways across thousands of campaigns that never made headlines. Scanning a code often just led to a company’s normal website, one that hadn’t been built for a phone screen, forcing whoever scanned it to pinch and zoom through a desktop layout, which defeated the entire premise of a mobile-native shortcut. Industry measurement through the year, including tracking from comScore, kept finding that only a modest single-digit percentage of mobile users had ever scanned a QR code at all, a gap between how often brands were printing the codes and how often anyone was using them.
By the end of 2011, the format had earned a split reputation. Done well, as in Seoul, it showed real promise as a bridge between physical and digital retail. Done carelessly, which was most of the time, it was a black-and-white square that consumers had learned to ignore, printed by marketers who’d added it because everyone else was adding it, without a clear answer for why a customer should bother pulling out their phone to scan it.
