Thursday, February 10, 2011

QR Tags for Every Booth at Art of Home Show

 

There is a first for everything; at the recent Art of Home Show at the Santa Clara Convention Center QR tags were assigned to every booth by the show organizer. The service was managed by Real Intelligence. QR tags are not new and commonly  seen associated with many Internet and mobile related products or services in print advertising.

What makes this different is the fact the tags were for all the exhibitors and managed by Real Intelligence and not each company on their own. Also what made this difference was the attendees to the show did not fit the demographics you would associate to QR tag users (smart phone power users).

I was curious why this show issued them to every exhibitor and who was behind it so I went looking for Real Intelligence to find out the reason. I met Steve Kompolt the CEO of Real Intelligence at his booth and not to be unkind I asked him why this show as it seemed extremely unlikely the attendees at this show would even recognize the QR tag much less know how to access it with their cell phone. In addition not one exhibitor I talked to at the show had any idea what the QR tags were or how they worked. With that out of the way Steve told me the idea behind the choice of show and real reason this was important.

        

Steve's company provides show organizers a complete set of tools for managing their shows and as part on a new service (QR Tags) this show was the beta test of the service. According to Steve it worked as planned, they were under no illusion about the audience's awareness of QR tags but that was not the point the point was to see if they could organize the entire exhibit hall and provide every booth with their own working QR tag. It worked. Maybe it did not have the volume a more technology based show might have had but none the less those who used it got the information unique to the QR tags.

The attendees were taken directly to the exhibitors web site, the sponsors captured important demographics on the attendees who used the service and best of all the exhibitors received another way to connect with potential customers for no additional charge. The service will run for 3 months after the show so exhibitors can continue to use it and take advantage of the service.

Steve's purpose was three fold, to provide the show organizers another tool, provide attendees additional services beyond just being at the show and third give the exhibitors a valuable service beyond the booth space.

Will it catch on, only time will tell. Was it worth the effort to Steve's company only he will know that but at least at the show he thought so. Will we be seeing it at future shows as part of the organizers package to exhibitors? It makes more sense than the free sign they give each exhibitor now, at least it is useful for all parties.

More questions about Real Intelligence or want to get in touch with Steve you can contact him at steve@realintelligence.com.  QR stands for Quick Response and invented by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994 for parts bar code.

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