Incentives for acknowledging product advertising within media content

A cloud-based service provides incentives for users of devices such as game consoles, personal computers, smartphones, and the like to explicitly acknowledge product placements within media content by offering rewards to the users that may be obtained by performing certain user actions as the media content is being consumed and rendered on the device. The user actions may comprise clicking a button or performing a gesture to an input device, for example, at particular times in the media content presentation in which a branded product is shown, mentioned, or used. A client component on the device captures the user actions as signals which are sent to the service which compares the signals against known reward criteria. If reward criteria are met by the user actions, the service can provide either digital or physical rewards to the user.