A lot of great technology is just too foreign, intimidating, awkward or difficult to grok with consumers. For me, for many years, one such technology was the Quick Response code, or QR code. But recent use within interactive and shoppable TV coupled with pandemic-driven consumer behavior changes could be signaling a shift in QR code adoption.
Invented within the Japanese automotive industry in 1994, the idea from a functional standpoint is a no-brainer. A two-dimensional Universal Product Code can’t encode enough information for the huge range of manufacturing and industrial workflows that would be more easily automated with a machine-readable tag.
Indeed, the QR Code is, first off, an immense achievement. The richness of information that it can encode, the simplicity of the user experience with it, and the extent to which elegant design and advanced error correction algorithms make it work so reliably, all ensured the QR code would find a robust, growing home in B2B use cases.
Then came mobile phones and the mobile web explosion.
It was immediately obvious to many consumer marketers that pointing a camera phone at an object is something that everyone knows how to do. Look at all the pictures we take, after all.
But most importantly, it was capable of eliminating several tedious, unpleasant and error-prone steps when using a mobile phone to access information. Pulling up a mobile web browser, typing in the proper URL, perhaps fat-fingering the string and being forced to try again – this entire effort disappears with one reliable and seamless “pointing” action.
For that reason, consumer marketers have essentially tried again and again to leverage the QR code to elicit more, better and quicker responses from consumers than could be achieved with a www dot URL.
But two problems remained, and they’ve blocked adoption.
The first issue was due to Apple. It wasn’t until 2017 with the release of iOS 11 that a QR code reader was built-in natively to the iPhone. This was done primarily for the Chinese consumer market as well as for the wide range of business-to-business use cases that had clearly become essential. But because it’s now natively in the camera of every iPhone, the ability to use the QR code en masse became instantly viable.
The second reason? QR codes don’t stick. They look odd and intimidating. They don’t provide clarity as to what will follow from a scanning action. Often times that action wasn’t worth the effort, or not known at all.
One of my favorite books on web usability and user experience is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.” The title says it all in this enjoyable read. In those first, pre-conscious and sub-second cognitive processes that neuroscience has recently discovered, the QR Code was exhausting! And to make things worse, it’s ugly.
This piece by CNET sums it all up nicely. The QR Code in 2017 was a must-have feature for a wide range of specific workflows. But that doesn’t mean it was usable. Apple hid this feature, as the piece says, and didn’t bother promoting it to consumers. Few technologies have been declared dead quite as many times.
And in my view, it might never have taken root…if not for the pandemic.
But times have changed.
The chart below is the level of interest in the search term “QR code scan” as analyzed by the Google Trends database. As you would expect in this era of pandemic-driven lock-downs transactions, we see a significant uptick in 2020.
Now, the QR code plays such an increasingly vital role in many touchless consumer and retail workflows that we wanted to know how many people actually know what a QR code is, and how to scan one?
It’s a question that is timely right now because more channels and programmers are experimenting with the QR code inside their broadcasts. Here’s an October 2019 article on NBC Universal’s Shoppable TV Ads which leveraged QR codes to run creative sponsored by Lacoste during the French Open. And here’s a January 2021 clip from a local Bay Area station – the broadcaster calling out the instructions added that “typing in URLs is the old way of doing things.”
So, what’s the number exactly? It’s about half. Half of all U.S. Internet users know what a QR code is and know how to scan one.
We did some research into historical adoption or awareness rates for QR Codes but – not surprisingly, given the level of disinterest in the topic – we found little that would be a useful comparison. If I had to guess, my answer would certainly have been less than 25%! What do you think? Send me an email.
We’ll continue to track this topic in our ongoing quarterly research and webinar series. To get a full copy of the report, download it now at RingDigital.tv/Winter2021 or join a panel of media execs as we discuss the data on Friday, January 29 at FutureOfTV.Live.
Brian Ring is Principal Analyst at Ring Digital llc, a revenue growth agency that uses consumer surveys to understand viewing behaviors, inform client product strategies and execute go-to-market thought leadership for vendors serving TV providers, networks, studios, streamers and broadcasters around the world.
Industry Voices are opinion columns written by outside contributors—often industry experts or analysts—who are invited to the conversation by FierceVideo staff. They do not represent the opinions of FierceVideo.