Comscore Collaborates with Solve Media on ‘Native Insights’ Research

First, some background. For those who may be unfamiliar with Solve Media, they popularized the use of brand advertising into the context of the traditional CAPTCHA experience. Wikipedia describes a CAPTCHA in the following way:

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a human being. The process usually involves a computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to grade. These tests are designed to be easy for a computer to generate but difficult for a computer to solve, but again easy for a human. If a correct solution is received, it can be presumed to have been entered by a human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires the user to type letters and/or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen. Such tests are commonly used to prevent unwanted internet bots from accessing websites, since a normal human can easily read a CAPTCHA, while the bot cannot process the image letters and therefore, cannot answer properly, or at all.

Rather than type in a jumble of random letters, the Solve Media approach asks users to type in a relevant brand message. An example of this experience is shown below:

Working together, Comscore and Solve Media developed a new method of brand survey research that integrates within the organic flow of this experience so that rather than simply typing in a brand message, users answer a survey question as part of their CAPTCHA experience.

Following the implementation of this new approach, which Solve Media calls ‘Native Insights’ research, the initial results were dramatic in terms of driving responsiveness. In earlier research efforts, Solve Media’s brand surveys – which were dependent upon users clicking out of the CAPTCHA experience – delivered a response rate consistent with industry averages. The native insights research implementation, however, produced a level of survey response that was approximately 200x higher than the baseline.

The ability to generate extremely large sample sizes is significant for brand advertisers interested in measuring their brand impact online because it enables much more granular analysis. Survey sample sizes often limit the number of unique data cuts that can be performed for a particular study, but with this native research approach sample size constraints were virtually eliminated.

While it should be noted that this effort represents a unique approach that happened to work well within the context of Solve Media’s brand advertising platform, it opens the door of possibility to brand effectiveness research done at significantly greater scale than in the past. And any such applications that improve the ability of the research to produce actionable insights for advertisers represent a step forward for the entire digital advertising ecosystem.