Working in the media industry means it is part of my job to understand and keep up to date with the latest developments in technology and the digital space in general. I primarily do this as I am genuinely interested in all things digital and advertising related, but I also need to be able to talk to my clients about these innovations and understand how we can best utilise these to meet business and media strategy needs. I am not alone and there are thousands more out there who will go out to clients and talk about the latest digital developments and think of ways to incorporate them as part of their strategy. However l do think media (like many other sectors) can be guilty at times of working within a ‘bubble’ and at times forget about who we are actually targeting – consumers.
I am in the midst of reading Groundswell by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff in which they discuss this exact issue. The books primary focus is around social technologies but we can take their key points and apply this to marketing at a wider scale. They refer to POST when creating strategies – People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology – and they need to be prioritised in that order. The point they make is that there are numerous examples where strategies are created around technology first and not people which is a mistake. We sometimes believe that a consumer will understand and embrace something just because we do ourselves, which is the wrong attitude to have. As an example I believe the use of QR codes is a prime case.
QR codes are not new but they have increased in prevalence over the past 18 months with increasing incorporation within press, outdoor and TV campaigns for a number of different advertisers but do the consumers being targeted actually know what they are? A few weeks ago I was surprised when amongst a group of friends only 1 out of 9 actually knew what a QR code was – these were all people who had smartphones and were under the age of 30. The general consensus was that they have seen them but didn’t understand what it was as largely these codes are often just within an ad but with no mention of what it is. I have slowly started to see more explanation around QR codes with a recent example being a B&Q ad having a ‘what’s this’ explanation next to one and I believe that advertisers have stopped presuming that everyone knows what they are but this hasn’t always been the case. I remember seeing a Waitrose TV ad around 18 months ago in which a QR code was placed on the end frame for 3 seconds with no copy around it which just highlighted their assumption that consumers would know what it was. I am by no means making the case that each QR code within an ad needs a paragraph but am merely stating that we need to stop assuming all digital developments are embraced by the masses.
Useful links
Quora – http://www.quora.com/QR-Codes/Why-havent-QR-codes-become-more-widely-adopted-outside-Japan?q=qr+codes (I particularly like the quote ‘QR codes are not understood by anyone outside of the most geeky people on the planet’)