I have to admit that I hate QR codes—and I am struggling to convince the marketing manager at my firm that we do not have a good reason to place an ugly black and white box on an otherwise decent looking ad. That ugly box is a QR code and he has belatedly joined the QR code craze. The sad thing is the QR codes that we are generating are leading to… the homepage of our website. Not a video, not a particularly interesting page on our website, not a blog authored by one of our attorneys, just our homepage. As a designer, I think the QR codes are an unnecessary element that take something esthetically pleasing away from the ad's overall design. As a marketing manager, he's thinking that it adds an element of value. If the codes led to an interesting video, I would agree. As they are now, they fail to add anything that may interest the reader of the ad.
Here is a link to some other QR code fails, some which are pretty funny, a couple that are downright dangerous and others that make you wonder just what the ad agency/marketing department was thinking.
