From Cost Center to Growth Driver: ROI of Brand Control

Welcome everyone. I hope that you're kind of trickling in. My name is SJ and I am from MarqVision and today I'm joined by two incredibly intelligent people. I'm joined first by Charlie Abrahams. Now Charlie is a seasoned leader in the brand protection space. He's been in it for decades, still writing about it. He's a commentator. He's really an expert in the field. Charlie, say hello. 

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Good morning, afternoon, or evening wherever you are in the world. Wherever you are. 

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I love that.  And I'm also joined by Jay who leads product innovation here at MarqVision. Hello Jay. 

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Hi everyone. 

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Awesome. Today we are talking about our brand exposure report and how brands can turn brand protection from a cost center into a growth driver which is a continuous large conversation that we're having here at MarqVision. This is part of a larger series called the Vision series. So you may see a few more of these but today we're going real deep. We're bringing in Charlie to talk about the historical context of brand protection. We're going to look at the product, the new MarqVision brand exposure report together and kind of talk through how that works and how brands can put that into play. So, let's go ahead and dig right in. Charlie, I'm so excited to have you here today because you've been doing this for a while. So, can you talk a little bit about your experience with unauthorized sales, counterfeits, digital abuse? There's a lot there. What's been your experience with brand protection?

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It's just been it's just been a fantastic sector to be involved in. I really love it's two decades basically. I've been involved mid 2000s, I joined the industry. And what was funny about it then was that there really wasn't an online brand protection industry. People thought of brand protection as raiding markets, you know, seizing uh fake goods at factories, that kind of stuff. I remember go, and one of the sort of stellar memories of mine is, I remember going to a conference in Milan where all the big fashion companies were there and they were talking about all this stuff and I put my hand up and said what about the internet? Aren't you worried about the internet? Because I've just joined an online brand protection company and they said the internet? We're never going to sell our $2,000 handbags and $10,000 watches on the internet. Guess what? Five years later, they were all they had all opened stores and they they were doing 10 to 20% of their revenue through the internet and they were most of them were clients of mine by then. So, so what really happened and the reason it's become such a topical thing and it's only sort of compounded manyfold since since that period is, you know, everybody is now transacting so much more digitally than they were 20 years ago. I mean, you know, I I just went out and bought something. I did all my research for it online. Everybody does that now. So once these these even you know the famous fashion houses once they had their own online stores up when the CEO of that company went and looked online and searched for his brand and found that there were there were knockoffs and sites pretending to be them all over the place. They were ringing the brand protection or the legal IP department or whatever they had in the company and saying, "What the hell's going on?" you know, people are trying to find our products and buy them on the internet. They can't do that now. So, so that's really where it started and that's that's that's why it went from being something was not topical to something that is super topical now, frankly.

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Amazing. And so let's let's say you know when you joined the joined the industry two decades ago what was the what was the kind the approach to quantifying the ROI of investing in protecting your brand? 

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At that stage, people just suddenly realized they needed to do something about it. And I think most of them lurched into brand protection programs started at that time often by the legal department, legal, intellectual property, you know, our trademarks being infringed, people are stealing our copyrighted uh images, etc., etc. And it was probably only after a few years of spending significant money on it, they thought, hang on, what are we getting back from this? And that's when I got lots of inquiries from people about, hey, how would you go about building a return on investment model to look at what we're getting from our online brand protection program and there's been a lot, you know, I've written quite a lot about that and there's been a lot of discussion about that over the years. Um, but but I think it was sort of only after they'd spent significant amounts of money on it and people have started to think, wow, well, you know, what am I getting for this? So, so they started to question it a little bit and and there is huge justification, but it's very important to understand where that justification exists and where it doesn't exist and also how important the numbers are to you versus some other benefits. 

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It's amazing. Thank you for that. So, what you're saying it's not a new problem, scale is always shifting, changing, growing. So, Jay, that brings me to you as the creator of our brand exposure report and somebody who's been handling this area of our product. Can you talk a little bit more or not even more just talk a little bit about how this product was designed um and what its goals were?

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Sure. So uh when we started building the brand exposure report uh our main focus was to help brands to see the whole picture not just you know isolated numbers or platform level data. So before this uh the I've seen a lot of our customers were working in silos. They could see what was happening on individual platforms but they still couldn't answer a simple question like uh where are we actually exposed or what's changing over time. So our goal was to bring everything together into one consistent framework uh showing at a glance uh where the real risks were uh whether there was any right IP foundation uh in place to tackle those problems and what kind of actions should come next and uh another big focus uh for me was to build it build the the baseline for the measurement. So uh as Charlie mentioned um you know the brand the efforts for the brand protection program was really difficult to track, quantify, and you know uh you know see the improvement over time. So we wanted to build a foundation uh that allows uh the brand protection program to be tracked quantified and you know improved just like any other business functions. Um and so we we built this like thing called uh the saturation rate and that metric became the anchor point within our report. And this is uh the core in turning what used to be a very very qualitative or indirect into something measurable and repeatable. 

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Amazing Jay. Always a pleasure to listen to you talk about your product. Um always so thoughtful in in how you kind of approach that. So, without further ado, let's go ahead and take a look at the product. We have a short 2-minute snippet from Jay's presentation at IPxLA at the Grammy Museum in LA. So, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so we can watch it together. Give me one second.

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Introducing your personalized brand exposure report. What once felt like a chaos is now a single clear map. As you can see, you can pinpoint the biggest risk by country and by platform and can even overlay your IP coverage. And if you click on China, as we just did here, it clearly shows the issues that you're facing and whether there's an IP foundation in place to take enforcement actions. And below that, you can also double click into each platform to get more detailed insights. Next, you will also walk away with clear next steps. This report highlights where your team should focus and even lays out strategies based on the strength of your IP foundation. And this is an example of Marq AI analyzing product images, text

descriptions, search visibility, and even shipping addresses. Then it evaluates the risk level, surfacing only the listings truly worth acting on. With this view, you can finally understand the baseline and track the progress over time. You can take back control of a problem that once felt impossible to manage. And yes, stop stop playing whack-a-mole once and for all.

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Amazing. Now I think it's important to call out that Jay while giving this presentation was and is pregnant and I feel like that is the most impressive thing to breathe and have breath support and talk to a huge audience of people. So props to you Jay. So looking at that, Charlie, what were some of your thoughts when you saw the brand exposure report for the first time? 

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Yeah I think I think what's fantastic about this is that we're starting to talk about measuring the success of projects by outcome rather than by activity. So if I go back to that era of the sort of 2010 to 2015, you had executives saying uh you know how are we measuring our projects and the vendors would say to them well we're measuring them by we're taking down 10,000 listings a month or we're eliminating all these websites and there was a little bit of a so what from from from senior executives because you know I've got a saying which is activity does not equal progress essentially in the early days at that stage brand protection vendors were measuring and pricing in some cases their projects by activity. Activity is irrelevant. If I remove 15,000 infringing listings that are on page 50 of a marketplace listing, that doesn't make any difference to your bottom line because nobody who really wants to buy your products goes to page 50. They all go to page one or two. You know, when you shop, you go to page one or two of a search result, whether that be Google or that be eBay or it be Alibaba or whatever. you just go to the first couple of pages. So just removing listings for the sake of it is completely pointless. So what the benefit we have here from this this report and this whole methodology is we're looking at outcomes. So we're looking at the proportion of fake versus genuine product that the system believes is out there. And here it is on day one and here it is on day 30 and here it is on day 90. And you can start to see whether you're making an impact on what's doing harm to your business. And that that's what is important. So this is outcome based reporting rather than activity based reporting. That's really what the big step in my opinion is. There's a bunch of other things as well that I could talk about but that's the number one. 

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But the other one that I mentioned you know and I think is worth bringing up is when you start looking at geographies you can spot opportunities. I've seen examples where I've presented, you know, sort of one-off reports that we've done for a client where we've seen, you know, a huge bunch of infringing product in a geography they didn't even do business in. So, you know, we went to meet with a Swiss uh t-shirt, the CEO, actually, because this was a relatively small company, the CEO was the guy who was

buying the solution or dealing with the problem. And he said, "That's incredible." So, there's 5,000 units a month being sold in Japan. they're all counterfeit because we don't even have a distributor in Japan. And then he said, "Well, actually, maybe what I should do, you know, there's an there's a business opportunity. People in Japan want to buy my $200 t-shirts, which is what they were. Um, so I need to get, I need to start a distribution network that covers Japan. I'd never thought, you know, that wasn't on my top 10 list of things to do at the moment. There's a big business opportunity." So, you know, that's a sort of indirect return on investment, but it's very interesting to see that sometimes counterfeit demand can can lead uh to business opportunities.

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Actually, that's I love that you touched on that because I think that's something that plays really well into what MarqVision's bringing with this brand exposure report. It's obviously like how are we doing? And I think MarqVision does such a good job by using things like the saturation rate to say like, hey, we're not just going to tout some vanity metrics at you. we're going to we're going to prove it that we're making a a big difference. Um, but then talking about how this geographic data can actually inform larger business strategy because $200 t-shirts, you said was it 15 years ago? How long ago were these $200 t-shirts going? 

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That was probably 10 years. That was one of my my later uh clients actually couldn't find me getting a $200 t-shirt. But it it's part of a larger, more nuanced conversation of like how you kind of attack these things. And I think it's really helpful to just always remember that as you're looking at this data as this data can tell a lot more. And I think this report gives so much more insight than you know maybe just a spreadsheet would give if you were just looking at a spreadsheet um of that same data. You know Jay I don't know if you would have can connected the same dots and so I think it's really cool to see that. 

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So with this data having such powerful implications and how a business moves forward, Jay, can you talk a little bit about how this data is gathered and how brands can expect the accuracy to develop? 

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Sure. Uh actually that's the secret sauce, but I'm happy to reveal some of them. So uh we collect data from uh roughly a hundred of major global e-commerce platforms that we have uh handpicked uh based on their traffic uh regional presence and strategic importance. Uh then our system scrapes uh listings that appear uh within the top uh few pages of each keyword searches since that's where the majority of customer traffic happens. Um then we apply an exponential curve uh to model the rest of the marketplace uh landscape. Uh it's is essentially predicting how results would behave uh beyond those pages that we have scraped. Uh from there our AI model uh steps in uh they analyze each listing and automatically uh classify it as um counterfeit, trademark abuse or other types of infringement. And then based on those categorization uh we calculate the saturation rate uh which measures what portion of total search results are actually infringing and visualize that by region, country and platform. So that's basically how we turn millions of raw listing data into a validated u measurable snapshot of brand exposure. 

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Amazing. Charlie, as someone who's been in the industry for a minute or two, uh, how does it how does that land with you to see that much data being kind of synthesized and analyzed at that level?

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Yeah, it's terrific. And I think what's great about presenting it graphically is that it's really easy to absorb. So you can immediately see where the major threats are, you know, what's being done about. And I think having one number that you measure a project by, I mean that may be it's obviously a simplification, but it's but it's incredibly useful to have a to have a sort of KPI for the project that shows you how much progress you're making over time. So I think that's a big step forward. And so with this, you know, amazing data, Charlie, who do you think should pay attention to this data? Who would it who at a company, the CFO, the board, who can look at this? What can they glean? 

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It depends on the size of the company. But fundamentally, I've always believed that brand protection should be a business project. It shouldn't be a legal project or an IT project. It should be a senior executives of marketing, legal, uh, IP, but e-commerce very much. You know, I've met with, you know, in in my time, particularly in, you know, medium-size businesses or smaller businesses. I say we were talking to the CEO at this t-shirt company. Many many times I've had conversations with CEOs about their about the the impact of counterfeit activity, impersonation type activity on their bottom line and they're the people that really care about it and therefore they're the people that need to be looking at these kind of reports. It's incredibly important that it's a high level business decision to run a brand protection project and to manage a brand protection product project to make sure it's effective. It's a business decision. It's not a departmental decision. So So really important that senior executives are involved in that and they're the people who should be who should be looking at this kind of output in my opinion.

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Amazing. So let's say we've got this output and we brought it to the right group of people. How do you think these metrics should feed into broader business KPIs? So things like revenue, loyalty, trust. How do how can these metrics better inform other business decisions? 

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Well, I I gave the example of the um of of the opportunity for sales in a geography where they hadn't seen it. One of the best brand protection projects I've ever seen is the one that Adobe ran globally. Um and this is all public domain. They've spoken about it uh uh at many uh events that I've been involved in. And they're the first people that came up with this concept of generating, you know, turning a they were the first people in my opinion that came up with a really, really powerful message about turning it from being a cost center into a revenue generation center. Now, it's easier for Adobe because they're selling

software online. And what they had identified was that for every genuine version of their software that was being bought in the United States and they did this by country but ironically the United States was the place where the problem was biggest. There were 15 illegal copies being bought and they assumed that actually the customer wanted the genuine product. So they had this concept of a well-intentioned customer. So they felt well a well-intentioned customer is really only going to look the top few pages of a marketplace. We talked about that just before. They're not going to dig really, really deep. These are the people we want to only see genuine product. So, if we could, you know, remove all those 15 illegal copies, we're going to multiply our revenue in North America by some percentage of that 15x. And they generated tons of additional revenue. And then they rolled they did that same analysis by each country and they rolled it out across the world globally. and and they moved from being a you know they were spending a lot of money on this but but from being a cost center to be a significant revenue generator for the company and uh that was a very successful program they ran over several years and like I say that's that's one of the most strongest examples of turning it from being cost to to to revenue generation and as I say it was very well publicized at the time probably 5 years ago. 

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I love how you said they were, you know, it was to their advantage that they were selling digital, you know, digital products, but at the same vein, you could have said it was their disadvantage, right? Like by having a product that was easily replicated. And I think it's really speaks to their strategy that they said, you know, we're not going to make this something that kills us, we're actually going to make it something that sets us totally apart. And I think that um I spoke recently with um Elizabeth Milian, who spoke at our IPxLA event and she kind of described brand protection as both a shield and a sword and that really resonated with me because Adobe did such a good job of shielding but then also using that to kind of go out and make sure that they're being offensive and I think that's that's a really good story. Thank you for sharing that Adobe example. I love it.

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Yeah. The reason it's particularly strong is that because they could see, you know, they they could measure it being downloaded, which is much easier than saying, well, if we stop people from selling fake shoes, how many how many real shoes are going to get sold? They could actually measure it because the the because it was being downloaded. So, that made it a little bit easier for them. Yeah. They could they could wrap their arms around that one. Yeah. Yeah. So, speaking of that, Jay, um how do you kind of anticipate um MarqVision supporting brands in their analysis, their strategic decision-making? How do you see the brand exposure report playing a role in that? 

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Uh I think we are just getting started and the brand exposure report is just the first step uh in building this ROI framework. Um and we are actually putting a lot of efforts to build a framework uh and also a product that really resonates well with our customers and our stakeholders. Uh so I think we will uh eventually uh integrate an ROI framework that actually shows uh the business outcome as uh we provide more service to our customers. Uh and I think the core uh here is our AI model. So um you know the ROI framework is a combination of assumptions uh that represents a lot of business nuances and context uh and I think our AI model uh will start to learn a lot from the real customer data you know the sales trends, the pricing patterns, what are some of the frequently spotted uh counterfeit indicators, and also the enforcement outcomes um that comes from the platforms and this will make uh our ROI calculation models uh smarter over time. So um what we're investing a lot of our uh product related uh resources is that um instead of like putting a static assumption uh we will be able to uh provide dynamic uh ROI estimates uh that will continuely uh update as the new data comes in and also interact with our customers.

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Uh so just a summary um we are uh building a AI model uh that not only makes the detection uh more precise but also uh make the business case uh for the brand protection uh stronger and more uh defensible.

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Jay, amazing. So Charlie as you listen to that and it sounds you know like AI is doing a lot of hard work right like they're it's out there grinding what should the humans be doing in support and in partnership with this you know alarming rate at which we can acquire data. What's the what are the what are the business stakeholders? What's their role in this?

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Well, they have a big job in deciding how you use it within a company and uh as I said you know it it presents opportunities both to make sure that uh you take those opportunities. So go ahead and um take a business opportunity like the you know t-shirts in Japan example. uh but also I mean we can link to offline activity. The other thing that's coming out of this uh platform is an enormous amount of data. So that you can actually look at hey you know the the there is a big problem in this particular geography. Maybe we need to focus uh physical investigations, factory raids, that kind of offline activity in that territory because that's where our biggest problem is. Or you know maybe we have a huge problem on a particular platform. So maybe we need to go and talk to the executives. And I know clients who have done this, who've gone and talked to the executives at some of the major marketplaces and said, "Hey, you there should be nothing of these categories of products of ours on your platform whatsoever because for a variety of reasons that that they're against your terms of service. Those could be drugs, those could be uh certain types of product that that the platform shouldn't be selling, but there's counterfeit versions of the product on the platform. So, they will go and take that and negotiate with the platforms. I know I know a number of major uh enterprises that have negotiated with many of the major platforms around the the world to to literally get the platform to block from view any of those kind of uh products because of the categorization of the product. As I say, that would typically be in something where it's dangerous like pharmaceuticals, automotive parts, that kind of thing. So, so you can do a lot once you've got this data. Uh but you do have to apply yourselves as a management team and use the resources uh such as you know uh the consumer acts that have been uh passed recently in Europe in particular but also to a lesser extent in the United States and use that to you know the full force of the law to to get the maximum benefit. So there's there's lots of opportunities that this kind of data represents. 

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That's incredible. And you and I talked briefly beforehand about this topic and something there's there's lots of people having conversations right now about the return on brand protection. Um what do you think is has yet to be said or needs to be said about calculating the ROI of brand protection? 

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Well, as I said, it's not, it's a complex calculation, but also I mean I I've always said there's kind of soft benefits and these hard benefits. So hard benefits are stuff like Adobe Source. So replacement sales, substitution sales. If you remove all this counterfeit merchandise from a platform, then you would naturally expect that you will sell more of a genuine product uh on that. But some clients are are very interested in other things other than just numbers. So I've always said that when you're looking at the the business case for a brand protection program, don't just look at numbers. numbers are really important and and and that's what we're bringing to the table with this uh with this sort of data but also you know I've sat down with major customers you know in particular sectors who've said actually brand brand equity is what matters to us so I I I had a a panel at an event like your own one uh from a few weeks ago where I sat down with a panel of people from the luxury leather good sector and said you know why are you doing online brand protection and their number one reason was because they couldn't couldn't stand seeing really terrible versions of their products out there on the internet. They said that's damaging our brand equity to a degree that is is harming our our revenues. I mean it's very very important. If you talk to Nissan or any automotive companies about the sale of counterfeit um airbags, you know, their concern isn't the money they're losing. It's people getting their faces blown off when when something doesn't work as it's supposed to or not deploying when it's meant to and the person going through the windscreen. So, health and safety in some particular verticals, pharmaceuticals, automotive, aeroplane parts, you know, all this stuff gets sold uh illegally and uh in in fake versions on the internet. So, so those are sometimes top of mind and more important than the pure numbers. So the pure numbers are very important, but there's a whole bunch of additional uh things that you get from securing your IP and your brand on the internet that are not necessarily calculable, but they're still really really important. That needs to be part of the case and the executives need to understand that even if they can't put a number on it.

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Incredible. And as you talk about this nuanced conversation, how do you think this executive team should go about vetting a partner in this field? So, obviously I'm I'm a MarqVision fan. Um, but as as they're, you know, out in the market trying to figure out who's the best partner for them, what are some characteristics of a brand protection provider that you think executives should look for?

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Well, I think clearly having having the ability to provide the data is is very very high on the list of things. Having the ability to deliver it in real time cost effectively is very very important. And then having a partner who is prepared to think about the whole breadth of issues that you're going to face and how you might deal with them and to think about it globally I think is very important. You know the internet one of the things about the internet is it's like the perfect place to commit a crime because you know you I could be sitting here in I live in New Zealand. I could be sitting here in New Zealand running a website that's hosted in Russia selling to people who are in North America or wherever. you know, it's it's really really difficult to enforce against that. So, you need a partner who has the ability to to act across the globe. So, global coverage by the by the vendor is incredibly important. So, those are the sorts of things I I I would put at the top of the list, I think. 

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Incredible. That's a really good guideline as they kind of look is to ask those questions. So, if anyone watching today, I encourage you to ask those harder questions. How do you how do they get the data? Is the data accurate? what's their global coverage look like? I will say MarqVision's pretty good. But on that note, um thank you both so much for coming today. This has been a really important conversation that I think we will continue to have. Um this recording will be sent to everybody who registered today. Um any final parting thoughts or words, Charlie and or Jay?

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Just keep get the most senior people involved in the project and you will get much better buying. If you're a person out there who who is running a brand protection project, you know, this is something to be shouted from the rooftops, not sort of hidden underneath a a underneath a book or a carpet probably is a better metaphor. Yeah. Not something to put under the rug to trip over later. Yeah, that's right.

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I love it. Awesome. All right. And if you have any questions, please reach out to MarqVision. Book a demo if you're feeling bold. We'd love to talk with you. Um this is something we do often and getting into the conversation early can be really helpful. Um, and I promise all of our sales people and anyone you'll talk to, very kind, generous people. So, we look forward to hearing from you and have a good rest of your day.

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