2D Codes In Magazines Increase 228%, Nellymoser Survey Says

A new survey of the country’s top 100 magazines (according to circulation) finds that the number of mobile action codes significantly rose 476% from January 2011 to September 2011. According to the survey conducted by Nellymoser, two-dimensional mobile action codes in magazines increased from 88 in their January issues to 507 in their September issues.

Nellymoser is a company that provides publishers, brands and agencies what they need to engage their mobile visitors, including mobile site implementation, mobile user experience design, real-time mobile site delivery with optimization for various devices, mobile web hosting, and detailed analytics. Nellymoser campaigns are typically launched by quick response codes, near-field communication technology, Microsoft tags, in-application ads, digital watermarks, logos, audio bookmarks, or other action codes.

Quarterly Increase

The number of 2D mobile action codes in magazines has also shown an increase on a quarterly basis. Specifically, it rose from 252 in the first quarter of this year to 1,155 in the third quarter. This reflects a 228% increase.

According to reports, key campaigns in the third quarter of 2011 that involved in-book codes for sweepstakes included a This Old House issue, which generated some 234,000 scans, and Allure’s August issue, which generated 576,000 scans of Microsoft Tags.

Allure even relates that its 2011 August code campaign resulted to 576,000 scans, representing an increase from the 444,500 scans that resulted from their 2010 August code campaign. This year’s August code campaign is already the magazine’s second annual August campaign tied to daily sweepstakes and it reportedly had fewer codes compared to the August 2010 issue.

Advertisers More Open to Mobile Scan Formats

The Nellymoser study also reveals that advertisers are more aggressive in embracing and applying the mobile scan format than editors. The survey finds that 6.52% of advertisement pages in the magazines’ August 2011 issues and 5.76% of ad pages in their September issues carried 2D codes. Furthermore, in the September issues alone, 482 of the total 507 codes were utilized in ads while a meager 25 were utilized to enhance editorial materials.

QR Codes Are Most Preferred

Magazines use different types of mobile codes, but QR codes still get a bigger share of the users. In the third quarter, QR codes got a 62% share while Microsoft Tags got 30%, SpyderLynk Snap Tags got 4%, JagTag solutions got 3%.