Capturing attention, boosting recall

Here's a clever idea (in theory at least). You know the little bits of text you have to enter on many sites to prove you're a human and not an evil scheming bot? These 'captchas' are normally in wavy text often requiring you to guess at least one of the letters. Well Solve Media has hit upon a simple but smart way to enhance brand recall by having visitors enter a branded phrase instead.

The theory of course is as old as the hills. If you want people to remember something get them to reinforce it by doing something. And Solve Media has some nice research from Wharton Business School to back this up:

"On average, on a relative basis, we found that TYPE-INs™ increased brand recall 111% and message recall by a factor of 12 compared to the exact same creatives displayed as non-interactive static advertisements."

This, of course, has implications for all sorts of other activity where we could reward prospects for similar behaviour.

But a word of caution. This is a coercive approach. In order to get X I have to type in Y. I can see the real possibility of a drop in response where people refuse to enter the text on principle. Take the example above, for a hardcore Firefox user, typing "Browse Safer" in a Microsoft IE branded box might be akin to blasphemy.

Likewise, while users may recall the message, this does not mean that they will have a positive view of it (or of the brand behind it who have interrupted their browsing). As with so many things, it all depends on context and the specifics of the message.

I've got to say though, it is pretty clever.