Sometimes technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Warren County Visitors Bureau was sold a program — Maps Technology out of Venango County — that was projected to provide text-message based means of mass communication.

The program was pitched to the WCVB as a digital transformation from email to text messages but it required getting visitors to scan a QR code and provide information.

It would provide a way for the WCVB to target its marketing to visitors and also know exactly where that marketing was going.

But people just haven’t scanned the code.

And the WCVB pulled the plug on the effort during a Thursday meeting.

Executive Director Casey Ferry said the organization has invested in excess of $2,500 in the effort.

She reported that the QR code that serves as a gateway is published in a litany of places.

“The bottom line is it’s out there a lot,” Ferry said.

But just four people have scanned the code since December. And staff believe they can do on their own what the company was promising to do with this program. They pointed to a form on the WCVB website to get the same information that has been used nine times in the last week as evidence.

Cutting the outside service will save the WCVB over $300 monthly.

“The biggest thing that was the selling people,” Board member Troy Clawson said, was “targeted marketing.”

But you have to get people into the ecosystem to be able to market to them and Clawson said the company “didn’t necessarily say how hard it was to get the people…. It just seems too difficult to get the people. It just hasn’t come to fruition.”