Calvin Klein Replaces Billboards With Barcodes
UPDATE: Our fearless intern reports that taking a photo with an iPhone, a Blackberry, and a Samsung Infinity did nothing. Apparently (and this might have been obvious to some) but smart phones aren’t the only requirement — you’ll need a specific app to view the video as well. Consensus: a pain in the you-know-what.
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Calvin Klein has just stepped their multimedia marketing game up. The mega brand has replaced three of their billboards, two in New York, one in Los Angeles, with red and white QR codes — there’s not a single Lara Stone to be found. And a QR code — if you, like us, were wondering — is basically a two-dimensional bar code that can be read by most smart phones equipped with a camera. So what do you get when you take a photo of the billboard?
A 40 second video of Lara Stone “frolicking with four male models,” says Racked.
According to Mashable, QR codes are becoming increasingly popular, particularly in Japan, and advertisers are hoping to co-opt the trend as a way to increase user engagement — or, if you ask us, force them to “see” the ad in the first place.
But how successful will they be? Calvin Klein seems to be treating these three billboards as a testrun, leaving them up for barely over a week; they come down today. But considering we get out of the subway every day directly in front of the one pictured here and have yet to notice it, we’re a little worried about the investment.
We also wonder about the effort involved. While the idea certainly piqued our interest (we’ve sent an intern out on tech reconnaissance as we type this), we can’t imagine most people would take the time to stop and photograph a billboard — particularly in a city as busy as New York and a city as car-oriented as Los Angeles, though perhaps Calvin Klein was banking on Sunset traffic?
Also, we had to do some heavy-duty Wikipedia research to even figure out what a QR code was — how many people are going to know what to do with a pixelated billboard when they see one? And does it require a specific application? (We’ll have an update on that when our intrepid intern returns.)
Mashable points out that smart phone owners are in fact a minority in the United States, which begs the final question: who, exactly, is Calvin Klein targeting with these ads?
Our guess? Us — since we’re the ones writing about it.
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