Late last week on The Late Late Show with Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert appeared and sang a cover of the Rebecca Black modern classic ‘Friday’. Like many of you, I watched the YouTube clip of this over the weekend and got a bit of a chuckle out of it.

Towards the end of the video, however, I noticed a QR code being waved about in the background:

To my surprise, my iPhone was able to pick up the data from the QR Code, despite the shoddy low-quality nature of the YouTube clip and took me to a website congratulating me on noticing the QR code. It advised me that there was now a video I could watch as a gift for being observant. The clip was a Flash video. I have an iPhone. This did not work well.

I ended up emailing myself the clip to watch on a computer. As it turns out, the video was pretty lame and served no entertainment value, with Jimmy Fallon congratulating us on finding the code/video and talking up a charity that had been the focus of the episode the Rebecca Black cover had featured on. It was hardly of any real value in the social space that the video now occupied.

The QR code in the background was clever. Linking it to a video that iPhone users couldn’t watch was a fail. As was the lame video that it linked off to. It’s a shame. TV shows need to work hard to brand themselves and get attention in a crowded marketplace. Fallon has slowly been developing a reputation as an Internet/tech savvy host who connects with his youthy audience. This could have been a brilliant way to solidify that rep.

Instead, it was just a bit crap.