QR codes increase by 107 percent in magazines with skyrocketing mcommerce

Barcodes are now present on 10 percent of all print ads of this nature.

Print is currently a struggling medium in terms of advertising, but with a simple technique such as QR codes to bridge the gap between it and the digital environment, it is beginning to see vast improvements.

As newsstand sales plummet, so have ad pages, causing magazines and advertisers to struggle.

This has made it especially important to leverage QR codes and other similar mcommerce technologies, through aggressive strategies that bring paper and digital together.

According to Nellymoser research, the use of QR codes is taking off.

QR codes have become a very important part of this effort, and in the United States, they have become highly popular among advertisers. Nellymoser’s quarterly survey included data from the top 100 national consumer magazines, and showed that from Q2 2011 to Q2 2012, there was an increase in mobile barcode use of 107 percent.

Overall, the counters at Nellymoser found approximately 2200 of the scannable marks, including QR codes, Microsoft Tags, and digital watermarks. In the first quarter of the year, there were only 1365 counted, which indicates that there has been significant growth. In fact, the quarter over quarter increase was 61 percent.

Print magazines appear to have reached a kind of mcommerce milestone between the first and second quarters of 2012. Every one of the top 100 magazines in the country had at least one instance of a scannable mobile code. Moreover 90 percent of those publications had over 10 of them within the second quarter.

It is anticipated that this count will only continue to rise, and that the Nellymoser quarterly report for Q3 will reflect that. Some magazines have indicated that they have reached the point that every one of their ads will include QR codes or other ways to activate them using smartphones. This includes GQ, which should have every ad mobilized in its September issue. Similarly, there will be more than 250 images in Seventeen that are mobile ready.

Among all of the mcommerce actionable marks, QR codes continue to lead the way, as they represent more than 80 percent of the instances in print magazines.