2D Barcodes Are On the Way to Revolutionize Marketing

The blog entry today was submitted by Greg Dosmann, our Associate Creative Director and Visual Brand CHEMist.

We are all familiar with barcodes, we see them on products everywhere. But there are some new forms of barcodes, 2D barcodes (for 2 dimensional) that we will be seeing more and more for use with mobile devices.

To use these codes, you need to have special reader software in your handset. Then, for example, if you see a magazine ad which includes a 2D barcode, you can simply take a picture of the code, and your mobile browser will take you to a mobile web site that has information about that product.

Getting the necessary software into handsets has always been one of the biggest hurdles for the adoption of 2D barcodes, but the emergence of “app stores” has helped a lot. Plus several handset manufacturers are rumored to have pre-installed barcode readers for future releases. In Japan, QR barcodes (See images) have been very popular for years, and there are QR barcodes on many items including billboards, magazine ads, even T-shirts.