AI-powered brand protection solution for trademark attorneys and teams
We recently spoke with Jeff Baher, Head of Product Marketing, Bolster, Inc., about digital brand protection.
Bolster® builds AI/ML technology to protect brands and customers from bad actors on the Internet. Well-known brands from technology to eCommerce trust Bolster’s software and platform to detect and takedown threats that might attack their customers, employees, or partners.
Thank you, Jeff. How would you define “brand protection?” There seem to be several definitions in use.
Brand Protection is traditionally defined as the process and set of actions that a right holder undertakes to prevent third parties from using its intellectual property without permission.
The primary goal of Brand Protection strategies is to ensure that trademarks, patents, and copyrights are respected, though other intellectual property rights such as industrial design rights or trade dress can be also involved.
Why is brand protection so important to trademark owners?
A trademark is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others. Trademarks are in many cases inextricably tied to a company’s brand, and thus many apply a narrower definition of Brand Protection that focuses more specifically on trademark infringements. And this makes sense since counterfeiting of physical goods that involves trademark infringement is in fact one of the predominant forms of intellectual property infringement.
Brand Protection is of paramount concern as infringements can not only lead to losses in revenue, but can also have more lasting and damaging effects that destroy brand equity, reputation, and trust.
What is Bolster and what are the services that if offers?
Bolster is a fraud prevention and brand protection startup based out of Silicon Valley. The company offers a Next-Generation Fraud Prevention SaaS platform geared for both Brand Protection and Legal teams as well as Security and IT teams. The platform provides proactive defense against a wide-range of phishing, scam and otherwise fraudulent activity that threatens brands, customers and employees.
The SaaS platform leverages comprehensive threat intelligence and AI to provide real-time threat assessments at virtually any scale. The platform’s detection capabilities renders infringement verdicts in less than 100 milliseconds with a false positive rate of 1 in 100,000. The verdicts trigger automated processes to both block infringement sites at the browser level in seconds while also executing fully-automated zero-touch takedowns of sites in as little as 2 minutes.
What are the key ingredients to effective brand protection?
While the practice of Brand Protection has been well understood for years, the rise of online presence has introduced new digital touchpoints between brand and customer. These span domains and websites, both real and fake, e-commerce, social media, and customer accounts to name a few.
Many organizations have evolved as the touchpoints have, and in many cases, responsibilities for securing and protecting each of the touchpoints fall on different departments. Thus, Brand Protection in many business environments is fragmented, resulting in cracks and blind spots that lead to vulnerabilities and attacks.
To address this, ultimately three critical ingredients are required for effective Brand Protection:
- Holistic Thinking – Organizations must be able to understand and recognize the full picture of digital touchpoints that exist between digital brand and customer. These touchpoints define areas of risk, both risk of fraud and risk to brand and business.
- Teamwork – In the digital world, fraud and infringements happen fast. It is critical that organizations are positioned for teamwork and collaboration across the various functions that hold a vested interest in Brand Protection. Many organizations are adopting Trust & Safety organizational constructs to facilitate such teamwork and cross-functional collaboration.
- Technology – Fraud and infringements not only happen fast in the digital world, they also happen at tremendous scale. Many Brand Protection teams simply can’t keep up with this volume day in and day out. Ultimately technology is required capable of fighting scale with scale. This means both ultra-fast detection capabilities and fully automated takedown capabilities, combined.
How can trademark attorneys work with Bolster to protect their clients’ brands?
Perhaps the best way for trademark attorneys to work with Bolster to protect their client’s brands is by requesting a free Domain Risk Report. Through the request we will produce an elegant, easy-to-digest report of activities that threaten you client’s brand. This will include data on suspicious domains as well as active phishing and fraud sites.
Clients can use this report and data to help baseline current risk and threat profiles. From there, clients have the option to continue to work with Bolster for continuous monitoring capabilities and for more advanced detection and takedown capabilities.
Do you have any other suggestions for brand protection teams and their attorneys?
Fraud and scams happen fast in the digital world so it’s critical you and your team stay on your toes. Recognize that digital touchpoints evolve rapidly and thus your job is never done. Fortunately, there are technology solutions like Bolster that can have a significant impact, protecting brands and keeping teams sane along the way.
To dip your toe into some of our real-time detection capabilities, check out our free community-based phishing and scam detection platform – CheckPhish (www.checkphish.ai). There you can do free URL scanning, rich with actionable insights including high-resolution screenshots with logo detection and 1-click automated takedowns.
Editor’s Note: if you want to learn more about Bolster’s capabilities, schedule time for a private demo.