In the 2017 Annual Meeting of the International Trademark Association, a clear trend that emerged was the need to implement innovative technology into a company’s online brand protection.  Today, social media has made it easier than ever to share marketing campaigns that have gone wrong.  Similarly, as fake news becomes more of a problem, brand owners must also take steps to ensure that their brands or advertising do not appear next to unsavory content or in connection with extremist groups. As such, as technology improves, it can play an especially effective role in managing online brand protection.  For example, as more domains have been rolled out, more specialized web-monitoring services have come online to address brand owners’ needs.  To ensure the best online brand protection, a company should employ a comprehensive approach.  Relying on a narrow-minded approach is foolhardy, instead, a strong online brand protection program will stretch across multiple levels and encompass many different approaches.

Go Beyond Domain Protection

First, a company should ensure that each of their website’s pages have content-specific coverage.  Domain-level protection for a website is not enough.  Instead, a company should look to blacklist and whitelist specific keywords and domains.  Owners should also regularly update these lists of keywords and domains to ensure that they remain up-to-date, especially taking care to update each list in response to new threats or scandals.

Use Third-Party Programs

Next, brand owners should utilize specialized third-party programs to improve their online brand protection.  For instance, brand owners might want to consider using programmatic performance enhancers.  This allows brand owners to use predictive targeting in demand-side platforms to try to ensure that their advertising appears on approved websites only.  Other important tools for online brand protection include two-factor authentication and multi-locks with manual authorization.  The aforementioned are especially useful in protecting business-critical user-accounts or important domains.  The use of such tools can prevent malicious changes or unauthorized access to critical assets.  Brand owners should always deploy reputable third-party ad servers to block risky or prohibited content in real-time.

Educate Employees on Security Protocols

Lastly, brand owners must remember that online brand protection cannot be limited to server-side only.  Brand owners must also educate their employees and their clients about how to avoid common pitfalls such as phishing, viruses, or outright scams.  As employees at all levels, from human resources to management level, may have access to sensitive data, it is important to educate employees and clients about proper security protocols and keep them up-to-date about any new phishing or malicious scams.

In the end, brand owners should consult experienced intellectual property counsel to put together a comprehensive online brand protection program that is specifically suited and tailored to their needs.  Counsel would audit their intellectual property holdings and goals and advise accordingly.

For more information on this topic, please visit our Trademark and Brand Management service page, which is part of our Trademark Practice.

Klemchuk LLP is an Intellectual Property (IP), Technology, Internet, and Business law firm located in Dallas, TX.  The firm offers comprehensive legal services including litigation and enforcement of all forms of IP as well as registration and licensing of patents, trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights.  The firm also provides a wide range of technology, Internet, e-commerce, and business services including business planning, formation, and financing, mergers and acquisitions, business litigation, data privacy, and domain name dispute resolution.  Additional information about the trademark law firm and its trademark attorneys may be found at www.klemchuk.com.

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