In the beheamoth of a magazine that is Snoworld there are many ads. In fact, about half the pages advertise the latest in gear, travel, and snow (I would love to see the income statement of Warren Miller Entertainment and find out how much the movie makes on tickets as well as how many dollars advertising brings in).

However, in this issue I noted something I had never seen in Snoworld before: QR codes & High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCB). Including one from from Telluride.

Telluride opted for the latter of the two (HCCB) and after downloading the app, my phone (a Nokia Nuron 5230) easily read the code and took me to the mobile site (unlike QR codes that my extremely embarrassing 2mp camera has trouble reading).

In all, it took maybe 2 minutes. But hold on a sec, wouldn’t it have taken me about 15 to type in the address? Maybe, but there are 200 web addresses in Snoworld…only 3 had codes that my camera would scan. And wouldn’t you know it, I scanned all three.

Creating codes is easier than ever. Bit.ly automatically generates one every time you shorten a link (speaking of which, the QR code in the header is the one Bit.ly generated for this post). They may be varying reasons to why you’d use these codes, but actually creating them leaves you with no excuses.

Maybe these codes are just a gimmick, but it’s a simple way to break through the clutter of print ads. It got me to try.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.