If you’re a mega brand name of international fame and you’re celebrating your two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, what would you do to promote yourself at this current day and age? Two-hundred-and-fifty-years ago, you would have advertised your birthday in the newspaper. Ten years ago, you would have advertised your birthday on the internet. But now, you’d promote yourself with QR Code, of course.

Guinness is sponsoring a country-wide campaign offering viewers the chance to win a trip to Ireland. One cold country to another cold country, why not?

How? Well, if you’re forty or younger, you would have at least heard of Metro, the world’s most viewed and heard-of free newspaper; according to reports, Metro is being read by more than a million people every single day. From this campaign onwards, not only will readers be given information, they’ll be able to view online content and then have Guinness’ promotion pushed to them. Metro, if you’ve been reading us often you would know, is not the first newspaper to use QR Codes because National Post (among the many) beat them to being the pioneer.

QR Code is just a very smart way to engage people especially if you are trying to get people curious and clicking INSTANTLY.

In some articles on the newspaper, they will have QR Codes placed very clearly beside them. The square little boxes will lead the readers to more stories and videos (maybe) that is related to the article. It’s smart not because it’s new. It’s smart because if someone was genuinely interested in the topic being discussed or the news that was being written about, they don’t have to wait till a train or bus stops to get more information. Traditionally, one would have to wait to get to a computer and find the information on the internet.

So now that we have mobile technology that people can use WHEREVER they are, companies like Guinness are naturally jumping into the bandwagon. While it costs, literally, nothing to create a QR Code (you can create your very own QR Code right here) but creation of a mobile web page and also a system that tracks each scan might cost a little bit more than one wish for it to cost.

However, as more people learn about the technology, like everything else, the price will dip.