• by Tanya Gazdik , August 15, 2011

Office Depot is launching a nationwide mobile back-to-school promotion aimed at enticing people to come into the stores for a chance to win a $100 gift card.

The promotion runs through Sept. 11 and will award a total of $500,000 in instant gift cards. Ads feature TV personality Al Roker as the spokesperson. The campaign includes TV, in-store and out-of-home print advertising, email, and online advertising on Facebook, Twitter and OfficeDepot.com.

Momentum Worldwide created the promotion with SpyderLynk, a marketing technology company and creator of the SnapTag, a logo-centric QR Code alternative.

To participate, Office Depot customers snap and send a picture of the SnapTag, featured on in-store displays, with a standard mobile camera phone to find out if they have won a $100 Office Depot mobile gift card, which is redeemable instantly in-store. Winners will then take their mobile phones to the checkout to redeem their prize. Participants will also receive mobile coupons to save on back-to-school products.

No special phones are required -- just a standard mobile camera phone. No scanning is required like most QR code solutions and there are no special apps to download. (For iPhone and Android users who prefer to scan, SpyderLynk offers a free app to scan SnapTags.) People can also play without a mobile phone by visiting gobacksmarter.com/home/.

Brands that feature the SnapTag include Sharpie, Lexmark, Post-It, Papermate and Expo.

A recent comScore study on mobile QR and barcode scanning found that in June, 14 million mobile users in the U.S. -- representing 6.2% of the total mobile audience -- scanned a QR or barcode on their mobile device. The study found that a mobile user who scanned a QR or barcode during the month was more likely to be male (60.5% of code scanning audience), skew toward ages 18-34 (53.4%) and have a household income of $100k or above (36.1%).

The study also analyzed the source and location of QR or barcode scanning, finding that users are most likely to scan codes found in newspapers/magazines and on product packaging, and to do so while at home or in a store.