Last week I attended the MIT Enterprise Forum on Near Field Communications (NFC). This is the Northwest chapter of the Forum and was held at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. On the way into the museum I noticed an 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of paper taped to the cement pillar to the left of the many entrance doors.
The paper had a QR code on it but didn’t tell you what would happen if you scanned it. I didn’t scan it. (In-part because I’ve been trying out a Windows Phone and I had yet to download a scanner.) I continued inside to the conference.
After the conference ended I had more time to stop, get a scanner, and scan the code. What a surprise! The QR code was pointed directly at a .pdf file hosted on the Amazon cloud servers (https://s3.amazonaws.com/mitef-nfc/pdf/MITEF-NFC-whitepaper.pdf) .
The .PDF was a 28 page whitepaper on Near Field Communications!
Was I supposed to read this on my phone? I tried zooming in to the point where the type was legible but then I was forced to pan across the page twice in order to read a single line. Panning on a smartphone is both a side-t0-side and up-and-down affair so as I was panning the line of text was also floating up and down as my finger wasn’t dragging it perfectly sideways. Kind of makes you seasick.
FAIL.
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What could have saved this campaign?
I understand what the organizers were trying to do here, distribute the NFC whitepaper to attendees. But was it their intention the people have the whitepaper in their hand to refer to during the conference? There were printed versions available to attendees for that purpose. To their credit, the mechanics worked fine. The scan resulted in a download. Saving this campaign, however, would have required a different approach:
First, it’s never a good idea to tie a QR code directly to an asset url such as a document or video, which this one is. QR codes should point to urls than can be redirected at the conclusion of a campaign. In addition, if the url of the actual doc/video ever changes – particularly if it’s hosted somewhere like YouTube – the QR code will no longer work. Not good if something is in print or worse, tattooed.
Second, a mobile phone is no place for a 28 page document. On the Android phone (on which I also tested this campaign) there’s no easy way to get the document off the device. You can’t attach it to an email and side-loading is a hassle. Instead, the QR might have either initiated a new email where the user could then email the link to themselves or it might have landed the user on a page where they could input their email address in order to receive links to the whitepaper as well as video or pictures of the actual conference. The idea is to use the ‘in-the-moment’ impulse of mobile to secure a future contact or interaction, not necessarily to be the delivery agent of the content.
pdf to phone what a fail. You really are a trooper with all of your analysis. Kelly, have you ever considered creating a side category of really good campaigns that really worked. I know it probably isn’t the focus of your blog but you should consider it since we who read this want to know mechanics of “Good Campaigns”. I understand all of the pitfalls & just plain failure of common sense some people don’t use when setting these up. Since we all want to side step them maybe you could occasionally highlight a really Good & Innovative Campaign in the same step by step manor as the fails. I’m sure you come across a few.
Hey Yvon. Actually I get asked that a lot and have been considering either a sister blog or a side category. At this point the “Good Campaigns” can largely be defined as the ones that work. There are, however, some that are truly engaging and valuable. Feel free to send ideas my way! Thanks, Kelly.
Didn’t you miss the best part:
using QRCode to advertise an NFC meeting ?
LOL
Hah! I didn’t even think of that> Good one!