An Online Ad That’s Tough To Ignore

September 21, 2010  By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Just when you thought companies had run out of places to put ads online, a start-up called Solve Media is bringing them somewhere new:  the boxes of letters you sometimes have to type to get access to sites.

Solve Media's Type-In ad for Microsoft on an account-creation formThose boxes, called captchas, are intended to block malicious programs from breaking into sites and typically are used to restrict access to things like email accounts. Computers have a tough time reading the text, which in traditional captchas is squiggly, even if humans can decipher it and re-type it.
On Monday, Solve launched what it calls a Type-In ad platform, which puts ads and brand messages in the captcha space and has consumers retype short phrases from the ads.
Solve's ads aren't composed of wavy, hard-to-read lines as in older captchas; they look just like regular graphics, but Solve's program pixelates the image differently every time. This makes them easy for humans to see but difficult for bots to read, said Solve CEO and co-founder Ari Jacoby in an interview with Digits.

ReCaptcha
Some traditional captchas are used to scan books into electronic form and use wavy lines.Solve Media found that the process of reading and writing also solves a problem that has plagued advertisers online: Web users tend to ignore regular banner ads and have trouble recalling the brand's message.
Type-in ads increased message recall by a factor of 12 when compared with regular static ads, according to research conducted this summer at the Wharton School of Business. More than 40% of people recalled the message in ads they had typed in, versus less than 3% with normal ads.
Solve, which has been testing the service for about nine months, already has a stable of top advertisers on board, including Toyota and Microsoft — a rarity for a young start-up. The company will display the ads on about 300 sites, including AOL, Mr. Jacoby said.
Toyota's ads will be going live this week with a message that asks Web users to type in the phrase "a million dollars an hour" — the amount Toyota spends on safety, said Kim Kyaw, senior media strategist for the company. Other Toyota ads, all designed by Saatchi & Saatchi, will run through December.
"It's based on simple principles of advertising," Ms. Kyaw said. "Be where the audience is … and help them remember the message by having them repeat it."
And Mr. Jacoby says Solve's captchas actually take users about half the time of older captchas because they aren't as difficult to read. He says captchas are filled out about 280 million times a day around the world and typically take about 14 second each. So if every captcha becomes a Type-In ad, "we hope to save the planet 62 years of time per day," he said.
Solve charges a fee of about 25 cents to 50 cents for each form that is filled out using a Type-In ad, Mr. Jacoby said. He said the company splits its fees 50-50 with the websites where the ads are placed. The start-up is is backed by venture-capital firms First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures and several "angel" investors.
 
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/09/21/an-online-ad-that%E2%80%99s-tough-to-ignore/