"If you write something down, you remember it"...

First off- this article is about CAPTCHAs, and while everyone has encountered one, most people don't know they have a name. CAPTCHA stands for ""Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" and was coined to describe those pesky type-in word combos required when you buy tickets or post a comment. The purpose of CAPTCHAs is to ensure that it is a real-life person using a site and not a computer posting spam.

Now that we are all on the same page, on to the interesting/exciting news: CAPTCHAs are now advertising space! Ad Age announced that a company is officially launching CAPTCHA ads today and Toyota is one of the first companies to jump on board with it.

How does it work? The CAPTCHA box will now be a small ad and instead of asking the user to type in random letters, they would type in "Toyota Moving Forward" if that's the text that appeared in the ad. Toyota also tested using CAPTCHAs of their car's features like "Star Safety System." The ideas and reasoning behind this are as follows:

1. "If you write something down, you'll remember it"- users will have to type the ad message and are more likely to remember the word or phrase

2. "Banner ads are easy to ignore"- as websites become increasingly cluttered with ads they become easier to ignore, and this is a way that people cannot ignore ads

3. Using "Untapped space where users are forced to spend time"- there are no ads in this area and people are required to see and use the CAPTCHA so it's a new space and more direct way to get people's attention online

I don't know why this is so intriguing and exciting to me, but I like this idea very much. Just when I think advertising has completely taken hold of the internet, something like this comes out and opens up more possibilities. It's like the discovery of a new continent or a new planet... just when we thought we had it charted we find something else! It's going to be really interesting to see how this works out for sites and advertisers; I wouldn't be surprised if in a short while, this became the norm on popular sites.