Protect your Brand Reputation with Safety & Brand Infringement Suite

Consider your brand being placed alongside unsuitable content or falling victim to a fraudulent website that affects your image and reputation. Brand reputation is a fragile asset related to its online presence through ad placements across digital platforms.  

According to an advertising standards study, about 35% of Indian brand companies faced reputational damage due to misleading advertisements. Digital brand infringement, such as fake websites and social media handles, led to a loss of up to 25% in the market share of various well-known brands.   

The irrelevant ad placements and fake websites may quickly harm the reputation of the brand. The damage extends beyond consumer perception. It can lead to diminished sales, loss of customer trust and cost brands long-term financial loss.   

Concerns related to brand safety   

Brand safety risks develop when ads appear in circumstances that undermine a brand’s image or don’t align with the real values of the brand.   

Here is a breakdown of the common concerns related to losing brand reputation:  

1. Irrelevant and unsafe ad placement: Placing ads alongside irrelevant content results in the ineffectiveness of the ad campaign. Issues relating to ads being placed on harmful and unsafe content spoil brand image and do not bring any positive campaign metrics.    
2. Brand Infringement & Safety Issues: It involves risks such as brands visible alongside inappropriate irrelevant material such as hate speech, or violent abusive content.   

Issues come due to irrelevant placement of ads   

• Branding campaign wastage: if ads reach the wrong audience diminishing the desired outcomes efforts and disconnect between the brand and the viewers.   
• Maximum Ad skips: if the ads appear in irrelevant & unsuitable settings viewers skip them as it is not important to them, or they are more interested in the content  
• Loss of true views when ads are not delivered to the right audience in appropriate context’ brands lose the chance of gaining genuine connections. Leading to wasted views and ineffective ad spending.   
• Brand Unsafe placements could include the appearance of an ad alongside explicit content that violates the brand safety guidelines such as those of GARM. Various categories of ad placements cause major reputation damage to the brand.   

Unsafe Categories of ad Placements causing major reputation harm   

• Illegal Drugs Tobacco E-cigarettes Vaping Alcohol  
• Terrorism  
• Online Piracy 
• Adult and explicit content  
• Arms and ammunition  
• Spam or Harmful content  
• Death injury or military conflict  
• Crime & Harmful acts to individuals and society  
• Debated sensitive social issues  
• Hate speech and act of aggression  

Solution 

Most above-mentioned unsafe categories require an actionable approach that will ensure brands get protected on all fronts and mFilterIt solution carries a comprehensive way to deal with unsafe media advertisement placements.  

The key elements of the solution included robust region-specific Content Categories content context analysis, sentiment analysis, video frame recognition, and GARM compliance.      

It is done through not only keyword searches and meta tags in the description and title but also AI & ML-driven context analysis and sentiment analysis to ascertain relevancy. Furthermore, the frame recognition strategy involves analyzing individual frames of video content where the ads are placed rather than relying on the metadata only. And lastly the,   

enabling active prevention of brand protection with real-time blocking of brand-unsafe videos was undertaken.   

Let’s understand this with a case study. 

Case study  

A large FMCG brand encountered issues with video placements where heavy ad expenditure resulted due to brands content association with explicit content.  

To address this issue a brand safety solution was initiated by mFilterIt, and the following results were obtained.  

Realtime blocking helped in reduction of brand unsafe percentage  

Impact on business: After identifying the brand unsafe placements the solution started blocking them actively and brand unsafe % declined from 10.73% in Sep 2023 to 1.81% by April 2024, it also observed high ad performance on Brand safe videos as compared to explicit videos. 

Brand Infringement  

Brand Infringement occurs due to violation and unauthorized use of name, logo, trademark, patents or copyrights of the company or brand.  

TRA’s Brand Trust Report says that trust decline to negative brand association and brand infringements in sectors like FMCG and Pharms and top brands trusted dips of up to 20%.  

A wide range of brand infringement capabilities can be seen that hamper the reputation of the brand.  

1. Intellectual property Infringement  
2. Fake social media handles  
3. APK Copycat Apps  
4. Fake brand’s communication like emails  
5. ATO (Account Takeover)  
6. Logo Misuse  
7. Phishing websites  

Solution 

mFilterIt proprietary OSINT tech with the use of Open-Source Intelligence, scans the entire digital landscape for identifying possible infringements. AI-Powered automation by which the process of cleaning, tagging, and classification of enormous data gathered through OSINT.   

The 3-pillar approach solution can be applied to managing and addressing these brand infringement issues if faced by any brand or company.   

1. Identification of the list of official brand assets such as the official logo, social media handles, and instant messaging handles.
2. Classification based on potential instances of the above-mentioned infringement capabilities
3. Action included takedowns and blacklisting to clean and refurbish the lost trust in the brand.

Let’s understand the whole approach with a successful case study of a construction company.  

A well-known real estate firm faced various challenges of brand infringement in the form of IPR infringement and fraud occurring on digital and social media platforms. It was challenging to track and monitor violations manually.   

mFilterIt deployed a solution to scan the multiple digital platforms for solving the potential infringements. The content gathered through OSINT like text videos and images was given a confident score produced by ML. Based on high and low confidence scores the classification is done for further action.   

The impressive impact can be seen on the real estate firm between Jan- Jun 2024:   

Cases were found around 1300 with 1001 successful removal of instances of illegal content. Across 7 platforms from where the content was removed and takedowns were implemented on average 1-2 days. This is how a leading real estate firm overcame the challenges that were alarming for their brand protection and its wellness.   

To sum up  

As brands evolve into digital enterprises, they must maintain a vigilant approach to each of their online presence and reputation around the clock and proactively ensure that their brand assets are consistent with their overall positioning in the market. Solutions like PACE (media brand safety) and Sentinel+ brand protection suite can help in maintaining the overall brand reputation.