Digital offers brands the chance to forge real emotional connections with their customers. However, all too often this is lost as agencies produce work that has no relevance or use in people’s lives.

Everything that Know Digital creates has the customer in mind. Rather than just appeal to a brand’s vanity, our work is designed to do something for real people.

We believe that a simple and effective solution to one of life’s little problems is far more powerful than something that promises everything yet delivers nothing. By identifying everyday moments when digital can provide something useful, educational or even just fun, our clients can connect with people as living breathing individuals rather than a target audience.

This delivers communications that reach the hearts and minds of people. Our work doesn’t patronise or preach; it puts your brand at the centre of a positive experience

The end result is brands that are viewed as more than just advertisers. By actually giving something to consumers, our clients are perceived all the more positively, driving value to their bottom line.

About 5 years ago I wrote a blog post for my previous agency predicting that QR codes were going to become increasingly visible in the UK over the next few years.

Now that they have, I’ve changed my mind about them.

I was prompted to talk about them by a trip to Japan, where they have been ubiquitous for the last 8 or so years. It made sense in Japan at the time (pre iPhone) as it was the quickest way to access a mobile website – do you remember trying to type out a long url on standard phone keypad, it was too much of a hassle only to find the site didn’t work on a phone. QR codes solved this problem.

Fast forward to the UK in 2012. I’m seeing them plastered everywhere. Do they still make sense? well, sometimes…One of the benefits a QR code offers is that you can use a different URL for each location, so you know which locations are driving traffic to your mobile website or you can direct traffic to a specific, highly relevant page – e.g. at a bus stop you can direct users to a page that tells them when the next bus is due.

However, the majority of QR codes being used by ad agencies aren’t doing anything quite so clever, they are just replacements for the url, which is where I have a problem with them. When QR codes were first being used in Japan they solved a problem – URLs were a pain to type in and created a barrier to viewing mobile websites – however that problem has been solved by smartphones and URL shorteners.

Compare the 2 user journeys:

1. Assume you have a QR reader in the first place, which is a big assumption to start with. The user has to open the application, wait for the camera to start up, move close enough to the poster to fill the frame with the code, hold still while the picture is taken, wait a second or so for it to be processed and then click the link to open the browser and go to the page.

2. Open the browser, type the URL into the address bar using a QWERTY keyboard, page opens.

Which is simpler and easier? My problem with QR codes is that they are attempting to solve a problem that since the iPhone launched doesn’t exist anymore.

It seems a classic case of agencies and brands using a technology that they’ve picked up on for the sake of it without thinking about the user experience.

Agencies need to remember that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

So my advice, next time someone tells you to put a QR code on your ad, think about the user experience, does the QR code make something simpler and easier to access or are you expecting someone to walk across a train track, to photograph a code, to access a site, that can’t be loaded underground?

Even in the use cases above where a QR code can be used to track location response or deep link to a relevant page I’d argue that this could be done more effectively and quickly with a URL shortener.

Congratulations to our client Hutch on the release of their highly acclaimed new game ‘Smash Cops’. It’s already top of the new games list in the app store with 17 ’5 star’ reviews.

We’re biased, but we think it’s a fantastically beautiful and fun game, download from the app store here