The Fat-Tailed Sheep

This page on how nonprofits use QR codes includes zero examples of a QR code actually being useful. In fact, if you’re familiar with how marketing types obfuscate their failures, you’ll see that most-to-all of them clearly were *un*successful at generating any significant number of hits or attention.

This is because QR codes are stupid.

They are perhaps a useful tool for message control. For example, if my pizza place is terrible, I don’t want anybody googling it, because then they’re going to hit the terrible yelp reviews that say it sucks. But if I can send them to my website instead via a QR code sticker, they’ll see my flash animation and want to go anyway. Wahoo, victory for hiding the truth!

Which example is, of course, exactly why any *viewer* of QR codes ought to just fucking google it. And hey organization: you have a website. If you can’t figure out how to make short URLs that point to your specific content, you have no business launching a mobile initiative anyway.