brandshield
Photo: Tom Wang / Shutterstock.com
10 May 2014Trademarks

In the spotlight: BrandShield

How does BrandShield differ from other brand protection companies?

Other companies are mainly service-based businesses. With this approach, individuals view potential brand-attacking sites and use first-impression glances to determine whether they are infringing. This is expensive, requires a great deal of manpower and resources, and only solves the clearly and blatantly infringing sites.

BrandShield is a technology company that has developed software to revolutionise online brand protection. It is a shift away from being mainly services-based to a software-based solution that has the breadth to find all types of infringers, including trademark, cybersquatters and counterfeiters and uses advanced algorithms to determine which are the most relevant and damaging.

This means organisations can spend enforcement resources to act on the infringers that actually matter and could do the most damage.

How does it work?

As an IP-related solution, one of our first steps was to protect our technology through patents. The patented technology uses advanced analytics and heuristic techniques to identify infringement across the web.

The system searches the web as well as the entire domain name system to find websites that are allegedly abusing brands, infringing trademarks and selling counterfeits. It collects data from different sources and then uses keyword and semantic processing to analyse the content of each website.

Going beyond the visible search method, BrandShield also analyses the coding of websites, including metatext and metadata, employs natural language process, data structure mapping analysis, search engine optimisation (SEO) inspection, search results, traffic information and website credibility to provide an ongoing monitoring of the web.

BrandShield’s technology also integrates user feedback to alter prioritisation and scoring to optimise brand protection needs. The system learns from this and adjusts its scoring algorithms accordingly. The more you teach the system, the better results you get.

How does BrandShield determine on which domains to enforce a brand owner’s trademarks?

With all of the possible infringement opportunities, it can be difficult to know where to start and which ones will have the strongest effect on your brand.

BrandShield reduces the information down to simple prioritised lists that explain the largest risks and how to quickly enforce compliance through cease-and-desist letters, infringement reporting and Disclosure Reporting Pages (DRP) filing.

"Protective domain registrations have proved to be ineffective in protecting brands. It is like trying to capture the ocean with a five-gallon bucket."

Intelligent prioritisation lists also provide an overall view of the types of infringement issues happening to your brand, allowing you to monitor those that may grow to become bigger threats.

Furthermore, for each suspicious website, a risk details page provides the most significant metrics that can help quickly assess the automatic analysis of the system and provide input regarding the level of the risk, in case the user believes it should be different.

How do you prioritise who is worth chasing and who is not?

A brand infringer’s only goal is to live off your brand’s success while hurting your brand. However, not all are worth the time and effort to take down.

For instance, someone may register an infringing domain name, but there is nothing on the site, or there might be very little traffic to it. It’s important to know about these infringing domains and monitor them, but they are not a top priority for takedown.

At the same time, there may be hundreds of other websites with infringing content, significant traffic, high positions on search results and so on, making them a higher priority for enforcement action.

The problem of brand infringement is much worse when it occurs in the content and metadata.

Why are defensive domain registrations not recommended as part of a brand protection strategy?

Protective domain registrations have proved to be ineffective in protecting brands. It is like trying to capture the ocean with a five-gallon bucket. Brand abuse is more significant in websites that contain infringing content, that sell counterfeits, commit fraud and redirect to competitors.

In many cases there is no infringement of any kind in the domain name. Even if there is, brand parasites can always register another variation of the brand as a domain name.

Now, with new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), protective domain registration has become totally irrelevant. The cost of registering only the exact match of your trademark in all the new gTLDs, or even in only the relevant gTLDs, would be in the range of tens of thousands of dollars a year.

That doesn’t mean you do not need to register domain names any more, but the motivation should be more from a marketing perspective.

How do you go about enforcing rights?

Users can immediately respond to infringers by using the system’s cease-and-desist (C&D) notifications management module, a feature that automatically sends bulk C&D notifications to multiple contacts with customisable templates, and helps to manage them easily.

Users can also use and manage additional services through the system, such as DRP filing and domain buyout (negotiation) services.

What are brands doing wrong that BrandShield can help with?

The default position for many companies is to react in an ad hoc manner. The trouble with this is you are not capturing everything, and there is no way to prioritise which issues are the most important.

It is not uncommon for any given company to have thousands, even tens of thousands, sites which infringe its IP. Some are easy to spot, while others may be much more difficult to identify.

To protect their brands, companies need to attack the problem by tracking infringement beyond the URL. An effective strategy now must include deep analysis that accounts for an infringing website’s content, rather than just a domain name match and an impression of the threat.

That is what BrandShield brings to the market. Moreover, with its modular price strategy, BrandShield makes online brand protection available for every organisation, not only for the largest brands in the world, while providing a more robust and sophisticated solution than the services available in the market.

Which companies are currently using the service?

Customers include New Balance, Swisscom, Carlson, Radisson Hotels, Park Plaza Hotels, World Trade Center, SodaStream, eToro, and dozens more.

Law firms and consultants are also using the system on behalf of their clients to monitor their brands.

How much does it cost?

Pricing is on a per-brand basis, and is dependent on the number of results the brand has in search engines. Pricing starts from $80 per brand per month (with a yearly subscription) and may go up to $1,000 per brand per month. Other modules such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement monitoring, mobile apps monitoring, etc, incur additional costs.

What are the biggest challenges when protecting brands?

The .com universe will change dramatically in the next two years. For the first time in the history of the internet, we’ll see exponential growth of domain extensions, as available gTLDs expand from 22 to more than 1,000. The scenarios for trademark and IP infringement will now be endless—think: ‘infringers.anything’ and ‘squatters.everything’.

As a result, the number of active websites operating in different segmentations will grow exponentially. Search results and SEO measures may also change as a result of the expansion of the gTLD space, as well as from the direct involvement of Google, Amazon and others in the change.

In this new era, the old ways of protecting your brand will not suffice. Ensuring your brand is safe can be impossible on your own. We believe only sophisticated technologies such as BrandShield’s, that adjust to the ongoing and vibrant change of the internet, will be able to deal with the new brand protection challenges.

To find out more visit  www.brandshield.com/WIPR_1/

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