• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 7, 2013

I admit I am jaded about the underwhelming overuse of QR codes that lead to meager payoffs. But to be fair, on this issue I am closer to the disillusioned idealist who turns cynic than I am a blind detractor. After all, this is the guy who programmed a panel at the first OMMA Mobile show back in June 2007 called “A Clickable World.”

The prospects of activating the physical realm with mobile devices in much the way we click on Web objects still swarms my imagination with possibilities. All of those decades of digital content up there in the cloud now able to focus on a spot and enhance every real world experience with layers of other information and interactivity. Delicious. This opportunity is too rich to squander.

So perhaps it is because such sugar plum fairies dance in my head that I am so let down when clicking a code or AR target only to get a Web home page or a video. I know that videos have a certain luster, but I am not sure when a small chunk of streaming media became a payoff of some kind for getting a user to take an action. I mean, really, it isn’t as if there is a shortage of that stuff.

There is a shortage of good creative experiences -- genuine extensions of a brand promise and identity. So I was heartened when I snapped the QR code on the back of our latest Land’s End catalog that actually made good on its modest but detailed promise: “Scan this code and be transported to our blog. Find fun stories, helpful tips. New: the iconic white shirt.”

And it turns out that the Land’s End blog “View from the Lighthouse” is a charming destination. The blog is neatly sculpted for mobile use. A carousel of feature stories is on top with a drop-down menu that parses the content into posts about heritage, stories, style, people. In fact they don’t even try to push you into the m-commerce experience until the end of the menu. It is all about deep brand storytelling.

And it works. I spent more time exploring the dimensions of this brand on my phone than I ever would in a minute video clip or a set of product details. There is nothing inherently mobile about this. It is just a mobile-friendly lens into the general site log. But it is a wonderful piece of branded content that works, and a mobile activation piece allows Land’s End to open a new distribution channel for it. It reminds us of the enormous wealth of content that many marketers already have that actually could be channeled in interesting new ways via mobile. For over a decade, all of those different pieces of content have been poured into the homogenous container of a Web site accessible from a desktop.

Mobile distribution allows the marketer to take that flat pool of content and rethink how it might be distributed more acutely into specific contexts. After all, if I am a happy Land’s End catalog recipient I probably am spending part of the evening flipping through the pages at leisure. This is the right time and place to tell me a story about the people and heritage of the company.  

I am sure that activating product reviews, nutrition information, price comparisons, and (lord help us) more videos all have their place at the other end of some mobile activation codes. But there really is an opportunity to captivate people by contextualizing the content that has been sitting in silos and deep forgotten Web pages. We like to say that mobile will help us target that “right message to the right person at the right time.” Yeah, yeah. But a better way of thinking about it more broadly is to say that mobile lets the right stories find people in the places and situations where they most want to hear them.