{"id":294,"date":"2017-11-29T13:20:15","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T13:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog-staging.cdn.persona.ly\/blog\/?p=294"},"modified":"2022-01-20T15:03:51","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T15:03:51","slug":"a-captcha-for-ads-playable-and-interactive-ads-as-a-turing-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog-staging.cdn.persona.ly\/blog\/2017\/11\/a-captcha-for-ads-playable-and-interactive-ads-as-a-turing-test\/","title":{"rendered":"A CAPTCHA for Ads? Playable and Interactive Ads as a Turing Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ad fraud has been a pressing issue advertisers and publishers have been facing ever since ads ever existed, and is part of most discussions about ad-tech in the media, but the news coverage in the last few months, specifically the reports of the <\/span>fake video ad views<\/span><\/a> amounting to millions of dollars daily and of <\/span>Uber suing Fetch<\/span><\/a> for click fraud have really brought the subject to the spotlight.<\/span><\/p>\n

The change in status quo has forced advertisers to do some homework and take some action like using 3rd party solutions (like <\/span>Adjust\u2019s fraud prevention suite<\/span><\/a>), demanding more transparency from publishers and generally asking way more questions about each traffic source.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the surface level, this seems like a positive change: the more awareness of ad-fraud out there – the harder it is for fraud to go unnoticed. While that is true, a lot of confusion and misinformation is causing legitimate traffic sources and publishers to be falsely flagged as fraudulent, and while a lot of the media buying is programmatic and therefore more transparent, a lot of quality traffic still goes through manual buying through other sources that aren\u2019t as transparent.<\/span><\/p>\n

Advertisers still want users from sources that aren’t fully transparent.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

But they also want to make sure it\u2019s not fraudulent. This leaves both advertisers and publishers in quite the pickle. I won\u2019t pretend to know how to solve all of ad-tech\u2019s problems, but I do have a proposition that could help both advertisers and publishers that drive legitimate, quality traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n

What if you could effectively determine if a user is real on the ad level, regardless of where he was exposed to the ad, based on his interactivity with it? You couldn\u2019t do that with banners or videos, since clicks are easily fabricated. That\u2019s where playable and interactive ads come in. We believe that playable ads can act as seamless a Turing test, like a \u2018CAPTCHA\u2019, but without any effect on user experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to get through a playable or interactive ad, the user has to tap a bunch of buttons in an order that makes sense with the gameplay in order to finish it, and each one of those taps is logged, whether in a database or even on a heat map. At Persona.ly, we accumulated plenty of experience creating and running playable ads for our partnered advertisers, by monitoring these in-ad events we were able to make changes to optimize the ad\u2019s flow, and we also noted how they could easily be used to determine if a user is real or not.<\/span><\/p>\n

By measuring the order of the events, the time between them, and their frequency, it\u2019s rather easy to notice repeated and suspicious patterns. Advertisers already measure the time between the ad click to the install, which is an efficient metric but isn\u2019t accurate enough – some users are just quicker than others and some have a better connection – therefore flagging each quick installation as a fraud is an effective way to detect and filter out fraud, but it isn\u2019t completely accurate and can also falsely flag sources that aren\u2019t fraudulent. Measuring an entire session of a playable ad, consisting of several taps as well as other gestures like swiping can be exponentially more effective.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, check out the playable ad we created for Netmarble’s Travelling Millionaire:<\/span><\/h3>\n