Young-Bean Song, founder of AnalyticsDNA, a Seattle-based strategy and analytics research consultancy, believes “online marketers are not looking for incremental improvement. Instead they are looking for quantum leaps in awareness, message association, favorability and intent.”
Song contends online marketers can find what they’re seeking in something called “type-in” advertising, which is a branded version of CAPTCHA (the squiggly and obscured words you type in to a web page verify that you are human, not machine).
Song’s company recently ran some numbers for Solve Media, a type-in advertising provider. The study analyzed 43 campaigns and found that type-in advertising delivered big returns:
- 52 percent lift in brand awareness
- 65 percent lift in brand association
- 67 percent lift in brand recall
- 38 percent lift in brand favorability
- 24 percent lift in purchase intent
Clearly, those numbers are a lot different than one would see after running a display ad campaign. And I admit this cognitive approach to online advertising shows promise, but once again, there’s very little room for a meaningful connection with consumers.
Consumers may in fact be grateful for easier-to-solve CAPTCHA’s but they will likely continue to ask why CAPTCHA’s there in the first place. Yes, it save’s the publisher the hassle of weeding out a ton of comment spam from its pages, but readers/viewers don’t care about that. They care about themselves and CAPTCHA is an impediment to the free flow of content, thus an unwanted hurdle.
If it was my brand, I’d want to steer clear of CAPTCHA altogether.
