Weekend QR code roundup: Great British Beer Festival

Rating: UK brewers pretty QR code savvy

Thanks to 3 UK, GoMobile News visited the Great British Beer Festival held at London’s Olympia earlier this month [August 7-11th 2012]. Naturally, we picked up a copy of the show’s guide which is effectively out together by Camra (CAMpaign for Real Ale). Considering that this guide consisted largely of listings, it was quite impressive that the there were four adverts (Brains, Brentwood, Cask Marque & Camra) which bothered to include QR codes as part of their call to action. Unsurprisingly Camra’s own QR code was an easy winner. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, though. However, we do think this publication proved GoMobile News‘ that the UK brewing industry is pretty QR code savvy. Incidentally we’ve also found a QR code that makes good use of a simple link to a YouTube video.The Camra QR code initially takes you here. If you scan the code in, you’re eventually taken to a UK government facility which enables citizens to sign an electronic petition.

Now Camra’s e-petition seems to have been created by one Chris Schofield and we’re not quite sure whether Chris or the UK government is mobile-savvy but the net effect is a very mobile-friendly experience.

The loser in the QR stakes, however,  is the Brentwood Brewing Co. We accessed the site using both a W7 Mango Nokia Lumia 800 and an Android handset (Motorola RAZR) and it wasn’t even remotely mobile friendly.

Sorry Brentwood Design (behind the site), it’s back to the drawing board for you.

Actually, the Cask Marque site itself wasn’t that impressive when viewed from a mobile, either.

The site seems to have been designed by Merritweb and wasn’t particularly mobile friendly.

However, in the Cask Marque advert there were at least links to the CaskFinder app for iOS and Android.

We decided to let Brains off with the link from its QR code which takes handset users here.

The page shows all of its local stockist. Since you can zoom in fairly easily we decided not to dock any points.

Although Brains missed out massively on linking to a location aware app (or HTML5 page) which could easily have show the user where exactly the nearest vendor of Brains beers was located.

Finally, we have to mention Tees Valley the fast food manufacturer. The company has nothing to do with the Beer festival.

However, it does put a QR code on its packaging which links the handset user straight to a YouTube video.

Although the QR code is labelled “See a video of our farmers”, we think it is a crafty ploy.

It’s not hard to view a YouTube video on any decent smartphone. You might have expected to see a mini documentary when you scan the QR code in.

Instead, you just view Tees Valley’s TV advert. But in terms of call to action we think it works.

So Tees defies the assertion recently made by QRlicious on our site here that a mere link to a YouTube video isn’t a decent call to action. In Tees’ case, it worked.