QR (Quick Response) codes are popping up everywhere these days. Unfortunately, this has resulted in some horrid examples. Check out Jeep’s recent QR ad fail or this post by Econsultancy on dubious uses of QR codes – some of them are real screams.
But there are a lot of great ones too. Take a recent Heineken promotion. Long associated with its hometown of Amsterdam – and beer of course – it created a clever way to promote its brand message: “Open Your World” at the Open’er Festival in Poland. With the help of creative agency Leo Burnett in Warsaw, Heineken came up with a cool and personalised U Code campaign.
Festival goers created QR code stickers that contained a personal greeting. These ranged from “I’m not wearing any underwear” to “Who is Justin Bieber?!”. They then stuck the sticker to their clothing and scanned other festival goers to get to know them – a great ice breaker. A bit geekier than ‘Never Have I Ever’ or the string game, but a very effective and engaging way to bring people together, create conversations and to promote a brand. Within only a few hours, people uploaded thousands of pics of themselves and their U Codes to Facebook and were tweeting heavily about it. The YouTube video is only three weeks old and has nearly 70,000 hits already. Watch how it all unfolded below.