QR codes and their equivalent prophets of innovation have been around for some years now and have yet to be embraced by the masses despite several attempts from global brands to incorporate them into the marketing mix. However in these iPhone/Smartphone times,  drinks company Pepsi recently announced another new experiment around barcodes this time in collaboration with a startup called Stickybits.

Using a barcode-reader application on a smartphone, users can scan barcodes on Pepsi products like drinks cans or bottles and access videos and links hidden in the code. Users can also upload their own videos, photos and comments about Pepsi and its products.

All of this is powered by Stickybits, which specializes in tagging barcodes with information and accessing it. Stickybits’ product allows people not only to access information that is already programmed in a barcode, but add more information to it by uploading a video or photo to the barcode for other users to see.

To use Stickybits, you need an iPhone or a phone running Google Android. Once you download the app, you can start scanning barcodes or QR codes and attaching files to them—photos, video, text, music, etc. Then, when other Stickybits users scan the same code, they can see what you’ve attached. Stickybits sells packs of vinyl stickers printed with unique barcodes via Amazon, and you can also download free barcodes directly from the Stickybits website and print them out on your printer. In addition, the app works with any barcode that appears on a commercial product.

According to Business-Oportunities.biz, Pepsi thinks the Stickybits pilot is a way of providing consumers information they might want while offering a two-way communication channel, and could conceivably be a vehicle for delivering special deals, or coupons, or promotional rewards.

Reason.com sums up the concept using Pespi’s rival Coke as an example:

When you use one of the stickers that Stickybits provides, your audience is limited to whoever else scans that unique code. But a barcode that appears on a 20 oz. bottle of Coke isn’t unique—it appears on millions of other 20 oz. bottles of Coke. Scan the one sitting in your refrigerator, and your message will be instantly available to everyone else in the world who has a bottle of Coke with that barcode on it and cares to scan it.

Granted, there’s this thing called the Web that provides similar functionality. But if you only want to reach Coke drinkers with your message, and at the precise moment when they’re buying or drinking Coke, Stickybits offers a better way to do it. Or at least it will if it can convince people to add Coke bottles to their daily media diet.

Stickbits creator and all-round social media entrepreneur Seth Goldstein says:

“Just because something is made from atoms, not bits, does not mean that it is not dynamic, we have just never had a way to connect objects to each other or to people. This is an attempt to make visible all kinds of social dynamics around objects that otherwise have been invisible.”

See what others have had to say about Stickybits:

Ad Age:                  That Coke Can You’re Holding Could Be Your New Media Channel

Time:                      Social Objects

CNET:                      Wearing your Stickybit on your sleeve, or elsewhere

LA Times:               Stickybits allows you to embed digital content on objects

RWW:                    Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?

Techcrunch:         The Secret Lives Of Objects