Making money on security, very clever Captcha from Solve Media

OK, it’s more authentication than security, but Captcha which sounds more like Boston slang than the acronym it really is (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), has done some really great rethinking in the area of security.

Most of us by now have had to enter in the words that are on the screen and we enter them knowing that it’s to make sure we aren’t computers.  That, as I learned today, is mostly from the company called Solve Media.  We have had put up with it for a while now, and if you are like me, some days, the words are pretty blurry, and I worry about rejection at times.

That said, in the last year, I have noticed that the words have become more relevant to the site I am on, and that has made it easier to read the words.

Then yesterday I went to a brand new site called Swayable (which is GREAT and I will blog about them soon, and the same goes for Doxo).

My first reaction was WOW.

And then duh!

Why the heck didn’t I think of that?!

Sell ad space on the Captcha screen, and force the user to type the name of the advertiser as the way to to prove they are human.  That has got to be a candidate for the best peanut butter in chocolate collisions of technology and marketing of all time.  You accomplish the goal of verifying that it’s a human, and at the same time, the marketer paying for the ad space has evidence that you at least saw the name of the company paying for the ad – that is just brilliant.

The person cannot move forward without reading and to at least some extent understanding the ad.  I guarantee that if I had seen the same ad on the Captcha screen and not been forced to type a word from the ad, I would have completely ignored it.  Now I am not sure the ecomagination message (above) is relevant to my life, but at least GE knows that I looked at the ad, which is ultimately the goal, but up until this point, they didn’t have a way of getting evidence that I actually looked at their ad.   Big win for marketers, and a relatively subtle shift for the Captcha.  Solve Media is the company behind this innovation – if you go to their web site, they have a very clever video that explains it.

This is going to be added to my standard talk about rethinking because it’s so great.  I LOVE this.

-Ric

P.S. Look for the Doxo and Swayable blogs entries next week.