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Scan This: QR Codes and Arkansas Tourism
June 24, 2011A story by Shan Li in the Los Angeles Times and recently reprinted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette explores the “mysterious boxes” increasingly showing up in the corners of ads these days. Followers of Arkansas’s tourism advertising campaigns practically consider these codes old news by now.
As the article explains, “…quick response codes, or simply QRs, (are) the barcodes for the digital age — but ones that convey far more information, and which can be scanned by consumers with smartphones and tablet computers to open a Web page, play a video or even place a call.”
QR codes have been in nearly every magazine ad produced by CJRW for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism for the last two years. First brought to the table in 2009 by the Department’s Communications Manager Dena Woerner and Group Travel Manager Renee Robison, the codes were initially used to quickly link to interior pages on Arkansas.com for more information. The Spring/Summer 2011 campaign was the first to link to video—giving us a way to place our 15-second TV ads in magazines and newspapers.
The LA Times story reports QR code scans nationwide are quickly growing—from 80,000 a month in 2009 to two million a month in 2011. For the first four months of 2011, nearly 12,000 of those QR scans took magazine readers to a mobile-friendly page featuring the campaign’s corresponding TV spot on YouTube and direct links to the most desired visitor resources, such as the Free Vacation Planning Kit and Hot Deals and Packages.
Joanne Hinson, Manager of Research and Information Services for the Department, notes that while it is a “…new technology, initial response is encouraging. Consumers are still at the beginning of the learning curve, and many don’t know how to use the technology even if they do have a smart phone.” The Nielsen Co. predicts that half of all Americans will soon have smart phones. Forrester Research reports that of current smartphone users, 25% of Android phone owners and 7% of iPhone owners scanned a QR code in the second quarter of 2010.
Another benefit to Arkansas tourism is the data gathered using the QR codes about how readers respond to our ads. While there are no benchmarks to use as a guide and the number of scans is heavily influenced by circulation and demographic profiles of the publications, we can get nearly immediate feedback on which ads and magazines spur the most engagement. “Southern Living” with a huge readership base generates lots of scans, as does “Bicycling” with younger, more technologically adept readers, and “Garden and Gun” with a more affluent market more likely to own smartphones.
While these numbers are becoming impressive, there is still a long way to go. The Department and CJRW have asked focus group participants what they think of the QR codes in research over the last two years. In 2010, only one participant was familiar with them, while 2-3 in each group were in 2011. All of the participants thought the idea was intriguing, and none of them thought that the codes detracted from the ads.
The ability to place videos and interactive links into paper and ink ads opens up whole new worlds of possibilities, taking us from the age of Gutenberg to the age of Zuckerberg.
While CJRW is proud of our long and illustrious history, we don’t rest on our laurels—we are constantly on the lookout for the next great way to persuade consumers and produce better results for our partners. We were the first Arkansas agency to produce a color TV commercial, and now via QR codes, we are the first to place a TV commercial in the pages of magazines. In the rapidly growing realm of social media, Arkansas tourism has been recognized as the first state to use Geosocial marketing in the book “Social Location Marketing: Outshining Your Competitors on Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp & Other Location Sharing Sites,” by pioneering social media influencer Simon Salt.
What will be next? One thing’s for certain, Arkansas and CJRW will be leading the way.
