Ever wondered what it would be like it if you could have a chat with the bag of potato chips that accompanies you whenever you're sitting there on the couch, catching a rerun of 'Friends'? No chance of that. Well, there would have been a chance if you lived in Mexico and if Fritos did more than just offer 'wallpaper' with their recent QR Code effort. Without pointing out the negative, we would have thought much more effort should have been made to promote the brand via the QR Code marketing campaign because, as it was, the Frito Lay brand is promoting their Halloween Cheetos.

Ooh! Halloween Cheetos! But alas, twas not to be.

What Fritos did was to....change their packaging and included a QR Code onto the back of the bag of chips. QR codes are uniquely powerful 2d barcode system developed by the Japanese. In the seemingly unassuming box of dots and boxes, therein lay precious information that can only be accessed when you have a smart phone (read: iPhone, Blackberry, etc) loaded with a QR Code reader. The QR Code can contain business cards, text information, links, and lots of other things.

If you wanted to know, Fristos is big on trying to market their products by promoting the health-conscious lifestyle. Their products are comparatively healthier than many others out there in the market today. So, we're thinking it should have been done from that angle instead of....wallpaper.

Wallpaper download is not nearly as enticing and exciting enough to make people 'WANT TO' scan the QR Code. Usage of QR Code is not yet rampant in South American and USA, hence, Fritos should have made it a bigger and more creative marketing campaign instead of offering a 'token' for making the effort to check the QR Code out. At the end of the day, curious end-users would have been disappointed with what they got. On our front, we're thinking it's not encouraging others to stop walking long enough to scan QR Codes.

We think that they should have made use of the QR Codes to lead more people into their Snack Chat Blog, an on-going project, which encourages interactivity, engages their consumers in chats, discussions and activities. The blog is a so-called 'insider's perspective' on Frito's good fun story. It would have been much more effective if consumers could directly get in touch with, find information, discuss, play games, participate in polls and surveys when they scan the QR Code.