Say Goodbye to Captchas, Hello to Brand Ads

“You are 31.25 times more likely to win a prize in Mega Millions than you are to click on a banner ad.”

Or so says Solve Media, a company I happened to read about while cruising around Mashable yesterday. 

If you are an advertisers, this statistic is troubling. But don’t worry to much because there is a solution.

Solve Media, started in September 2010 by Ari Jacoby and Todd Lieberman, has pioneered the TYPE-IN™ ad, which replaces captchas with ads that require consumer participation.

If you’re unclear with what a captcha is, its that weird, fuzzy bent text that appears on some websites. It is there to make sure that there is actually a person visiting the site and not an automated bot.

Bots have a hard time reading these things, but as most of us know they aren’t too easy for us humans either. I would estimate that about 25% of the time that I encounter a captcha, I don’t get it right.

In fact, a researcher at UC San Diego found that it takes us about 12 seconds on average to solve a captcha. This means that for 12 seconds consumers have to completely focus on the captcha, making it a prime location for advertisers who would love even 5 seconds of a consumer's undivided attention.

And Solve has found a way to capitalize on this real estate.

"Impressions are no longer scarce, but attention has never been scarcer. In the face of incredibly shrinking click-through rates, Solve Media delivers an engagement that makes attention more active, and aids brand message recall in a very unique way," said Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus on Solve’s website.

TYPE-IN™ ads are much easier to read than the captchas, so there is a consumer benefit, and they are built to force engagement, which is a big plus for brands.

Take a look at this example from Solve’s website:

Mashable reports that more than 2,000 publishers, including AOL and the Tribune Company, and more than 75 advertisers including Gilt Group, Toyota, Dr. Pepper, Microsoft, Expedia, Chase, General Electric and Groupon are already using the product.

With these publishers and advertisers on board, it was reported that Solve averaged about 620,000 type-ins per day in July  and is growing 15 percent month to month.

And it’s likely that they will continue to grow as research on TYPE-IN™ metrics are much better than those of standard banner ads.

A recent study on the effectiveness of these ads, conducted by Young-Bean Song of AnalyticsDNA, found that these campaigns generated 65% for brand association and 67% for ad recall.

“These results are remarkable. I have never seen campaign brand impact results this consistently strong in my 14 years of digital marketing. Looks like Solve Media has found that unique sweet spot of 'voluntary indirect engagement' that actually works," said Song in a statement.

It makes sense that these ads would have more impact than banner ads since users are forced not only to look at the ad, but also to type the message of the ad.

“People are not paying attention to banner ads,” said Jacoby in the Mashable article. “When they’re sending email they’re focused on email, when they’re playing games they’re focused on that, and when they’re reading an important news story they don’t even see the ad.”

As consumers become more and more desensitized to online advertising, its products like the TYPE-IN™, which insert itself between content and disrupt the online experience in a natural way, that are the future of online advertising.