October 10, 2005
In Japan, Billboards Take Code-Crazy Ads to New Heights
Northwest Airlines is harnessing Japan's love of gadgets to open a new frontier in interactive advertising: tempting consumers to access prizes and games by scanning giant bar codes with their cellphone cameras. The Wall Street Journal reports.
"In its latest Tokyo outdoor campaign, Northwest Airlines, the fourth-largest U.S. airline by traffic, is covering the city's billboards and subway stations with ads containing the bar codes. The ads taunt passersby to unlock a message hidden inside the square of black and white pixels called a QR code, which requires a special reader to decode.
The Northwest campaign takes Japan's QR code phenomenon to a new extreme, blowing up codes to heights as great as 10 meters, or 33 feet. At first, Ogilvy wasn't even sure if the QR technology would work at such a huge scale, so it conducted tests from multiple angles.
The first ads, launched in Ginza and the Shinjuku subway station last week, will show in 10 locations before the end of the month. One billboard ad on the side of a building in Tokyo's Ginza business district features the oversize QR code with the headline "The more smarts you have, the more you benefit," a verbal play in Japanese. Consumers who snap a photo of the code with their phones are taken to a special, shrunk-down mobile version of Northwest's Web site, which features a game in which players can win coupons for flights."
The above image is not related to this article - I couldn't find a picture of the billboard - it's serves only as an illustration.
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