A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was:

70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish!

This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal - the true "response rate" of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone calls, visits to a website, or SMS interactions are directly attributable to a regular poster? No one really knows - or, if they know, they're not telling.

For the first time, we're able to see how many people are reacting to an advert, scanning a code, and then visiting a site.

Currently, TfL's campaign is running at 5,000 scans per month - peaking at 259 scans on April 3rd.

Or, 16,000 in the last five months. With a rather nice growth in usage in the last few months.

Here come the nay-sayers....

But... But.... How many sites is that across? Millions of people, thousands of sites, only a few scans? Rubbish!

So, I performed a Freedom of Information request to TfL.

There were around 400 sites showing these posters in November. That may have changed by now.

Ideally, I would have liked TfL to have created a unique QR code for each poster. That way we could see Putney gets more scans than Waterloo, for example. But I appreciate the logistical difficulties of that!

Phone Use

We also get some interesting statistics about the makes of phones that Londoners use:

iPhone has surged ahead - at the expense of Android and BlackBerry. Windows Phone 7 still remains a minority sport.

Haterz Gonna H8

Frankly, I don't care too much what the doom-mongers say. Having over 16,000 responses to a poster campaign sounds like a success to me. And, best of all, the data is open for anyone to investigate.

If you disagree with me - I politely ask you to show your workings :-)