I concluded, by saying

You’re not too stupid to understand how to make effective use of QR codes. The “commandments” are mostly just common sense.

Use QR codes wherever they seem appropriate – but make sure that they’re scannable, work for everyone who scans them, and lead somewhere useful.

Y’see – I don’t think people are too thick to use QR codes. Most of the time…

My Isle Of Wight

There’s a new campaign to encourage people to visit the Isle of Wight. A laudable campaign to be sure. Take a look at this stunning poster.
There’s a QR code in the bottom left corner. Depressingly, the site isn’t very mobile friendly.

But that’s not the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

Look Closer

Take a look at the actual code they’ve used. Try to scan it – I dare you.

Muppets.

This is the story of how I hijacked stole hacked recycled it and, in doing so, prevented Nokia from having a serious PR problem.

E7 Poster

This is advert for the new Nokia E7. It really emphasises the tweeting capabilities of the handset.

Nokia’s marketing team have illustrated this by showing off a couple of tweets on the handset. One of which contains a Bit.ly short URL.

Here’s the close up… it points to http://bit.ly/CYRWP

Being the curious chap that I am, I thought “Ooooh! I wonder where that’ll take me? To some awesome Nokia competition page perhaps?”

So I typed it into my phone.

Yup – the idiots in Nokia’s marketing team didn’t register the bit.ly link!

So, it was a simple matter for me to pop over to bit.ly, create a short URL pointing to this site, then customise it to say CYRWP.

Malicious Use

If I were a scallywag, I’d have pointed the URL to an Android website, or perhaps one of the less-than-stellar E7 reviews.

If I were nasty, I’d have pointed it to a malware page.

If I were a criminal genius (which I am not) I would have pointed it to a page which asked for credit-card number, email addresses, phone numbers, etc of people intetersted in buying / winning the handset.

I’m closer to scallywag than evil mastermind – so I pointed the URL to this blog post. Hopefully this page will serve as a reminder to Nokia’s marketing team that you should….

Always check URLs before printing them on an advert!

Bootnote

Two other interesting things to note.

• The #hashtag in the pictured tweet isn’t hyperlinked. Tsk
• The URL “CYRWP” is an anagram of “CRY WP”. Are the Nokians in floods of tears over the death of Symbian and the coming rise of Windows Phone 7?

Why Almost?

I’m a nit-picker – but here are a few suggestions to make the campaign better.

• Make the code bigger. When dealing with newsprint and its fuzzy images, it’s always better to make the QR as large as possible – or as large as your advertising team will allows. Larger images are easier to scan.
• 
• A little more whitespace around the code would improve its readability.
• The text instructions are great – either SMS or type the URL in directly – but the text is fuzzy and indistinct.
• The video is presented in 4:3 aspect ratio.
• 
• I appreciate that you don’t want people watching a stuttering 720p video over EDGE – but I feel that making the video widescreen to suit the majority of phones would have made the video more impressive. As it is, 240 x 192 the image looks a little blurred which perhaps isn’t the best advert for HD.
• Finally, I noticed the campaign appearing in other papers.
• 
• As far as I can see, it’s the same code. It would be a good idea to use a different code in each paper so you can see if, for example, Times readers are more likely to scan than Metro readers.

As I said – very minor complaints. Overall, an impressive use of QR codes from Sky. Well done to those involved.

Into the crowded arena steps the HTC Wildfire.

I’m a huge fan of the HTC hardware – but I often feel that they ignore the customer service side of things. For too long they were silent on when their firmware releases were coming out – leaving VillainROM and Cyanogen to pick up the slack.

Android phones have typically come in two flavours, hyper expensive devices like the Nexus One and cheap-as-chips devices like the LG Apex. (Seriously? US$80 for a phone… wow!)

The Wildfire sits comfortably between the two at a reasonable sub-£200 price to own the phone outright. I’m sure it’s free on contract.

Right – watch this video so that I can earn tuppence ha’penny from eBuzzing.

The specs are impressive for such a cheap phone. The Android version is the slightly outdated 2.1 – I’d have expected HTC to stick Android 2.2 (Froyo) on there – especially as 2.3 (Gingerbread) is launching imminently. Hopefully HTC won’t be so lackadaisical with its update process for this phone.

You can buy the HTC Wildfire from Amazon and all good phone retailers.

Sponsored Posts – Love ‘em or Hate ‘em?

Well, for those of us in the UK. For the poor sods who find themselves living in the wilderness of ROW (Rest Of World) this is their BBC experience…

BBC With Adverts

The reasons for me seeing this are rather complex and involve VPNs and a co-located BES.

Regardless, what’s this advert like? The text is small and indistinct. The purpose of the message is rather vague. There’s no allure. Just a static banner. How very 1996. Well, gentle reader, as you know from previous excursions, I am prepared to click where no ordinary mortal would.

Click

www.BarCap.com

Oh – as the kids say – Em Gee. What is this?

For those of you with poor eyesight, Barclays have pointed me straight at the desktop version of their website. There is no mobile friendly site in view. Not even a link to say “On a mobile? Click here.”

To compound the error – the site is JavaScript heavy.  Too heavy for the BlackBerry I use to view the site.  You remember BlackBerry? The incredibly popular handset that every successful business-person carries.  You know, the target demographic.

What To Do

• Make your advert interesting.
• Make your site mobile friendly – or at least suitable for your target demographic’s handset

Is it really that hard?

Based on the evidence I’ve accumulated, mobile advertising is subject to a lot of hype and not a lot of professionalism.

Take this example as seen on my BlackBerry 9000.

Flickr iPhone Advert

First off the bat, it gets my phone wrong. It should be using the User Agent to determine which advert to serve.

Well, let’s be a good consumer and click on it any way…

iTunes Web Interface

What the deuce?!

It has taken me to the Desktop version of the iTunes installation page – despite knowing I’m on a mobile!

What Should Have Happened?

• My phone requests the advert.
• Advertising agency serves up a device specific ad.
• I click on the ad.
• The ad server sees my User Agent
• For iPhone, it should automatically redirect me to the App Store
• For BlackBerry / Android / S60  etc, it should automatically redirect me to the native app store
• For everything else, it should automatically redirect me to http://m.flickr.com/

How Can It Go So Wrong?!

I’m making the assumption that this is an advert by flickr.  It may well be an advert by a third-party who have a (chargeable) app for iPhone.

Even if it is the latter – why are they advertising on BlackBerry?  Or, rather, why is their advertising agency wasting their marketing budget by showing an advert on a device which can’t support the content?

Make Sure Your Advert Works

It’s not rocket science.  If people can’t get to your product, they won’t spend money with you.  They’ll also get a negative impression of your brand.