What are the various threats that your brand could face online? And how can image security and ad safety form an integral part of your brand protection strategy?
Keeping your brand safe has never been more important, but in a largely unregulated digital world, it can be difficult to achieve.
In this article, we look at how both digital images and digital advertising can damage your brand’s reputation. We also explain how a combination of protection over image theft and innovative contextual targeting can provide robust security.
What is brand protection?
Brand protection is the process of taking measures to prevent third parties from using your intellectual property without permission.
Intellectual property is defined as anything that’s created by the mind. This could range from a product name or a company logo to the design of a product, a written work, or an artistic creation.
This unauthorized use results in brand infringement or brand abuse, which can come in many forms, from counterfeiting and copyright infringement to brand impersonation. But they’re all designed to achieve the same thing, namely to allow bad actors to piggyback on your brand’s reputation for their own gain.
An obvious consequence of this is the loss of revenue. But what’s arguably more important is the potential for it to erode trust in your brand – and this can be devastating.
Why is brand protection important online?
Brand abuse is a well-established problem, but the arrival of the internet has seen it proliferate.
Recent statistics that provide a sense of the scale of the issue include the value of the global counterfeit goods market, which was estimated to be close to $2.8 trillion in 2022.
This is not just because the internet has given fraudsters a global reach, but also because of the impersonal nature of modern online shopping habits.
In the days before e-commerce, the process of buying a product or service usually meant inspecting that product or speaking to a professional in person before handing over any money.
With global retail e-commerce sales rising from $1.34 trillion in 2014 to $4.28 trillion in 2020, however, it’s clear that in modern times, we’re far more comfortable basing our buying decisions on what we see on-screen.
With this in mind, if there is a listing on a well-established e-commerce platform displaying the correct logos, design, and colors of a well-known brand – and backed up by official-looking images – can we really blame a less risk-aware shopper for clicking on the ‘buy’ button?
Brand abuse through digital images
Digital images play a huge role in convincing online shoppers that what they’re purchasing is genuine.
A study by Etsy, for example, found that 90% of shoppers considered the quality of photos to be either ‘very or extremely important’ to a purchase decision. Such figures go to show just how valuable professionally taken images are when garnering trust.
And the threat goes beyond listings on e-commerce platforms. With high-quality, official brand photography freely available to steal online, what’s to stop a fraudster from creating a false social media account or, worse still, an entire imitation website?
When you consider that 5% of all Facebook profiles – a total of 142 million – are reportedly fake and that more than three billion phishing emails that typically direct users to scam websites are sent every day, the potential size of the issue becomes clear.
Damaging digital advertising
Another potential source of damage to your brand’s reputation is digital advertising.
With the rise of programmatic advertising, human intervention in the ad-selection process has been almost eliminated. On one hand, this complete automation has improved efficiency.
On the other, it has led to a reduction in quality control and the potential for big problems for both advertisers and publishers.
Poor ad placement
With the ever-more complex processes of selling digital ad inventory, badly placed ads have become a common occurrence. Astonishingly, one study revealed that only 2.8% of participants thought the last digital ad they saw was relevant.
Often this involves an ad appearing next to inappropriate content and, while it is possible to see the comedy in unfortunate placements, there’s a far more serious side too.
A 2020 study by Integral Ad Science (IAS) found that 70% of UK and 62% of US consumers will cease using a brand’s products if their ads are found near unsafe content.
And it’s not just dangerous or offensive content that causes problems – quality plays a big part too.
For example, the same study from IAS found that 52% of consumers are likely to engage with ads surrounded by high-quality content, as opposed to 13% when viewed in a low-quality environment.
All of this goes to show the importance of ad placement in the success of your advertising and, in turn, the protection of your brand.
Retargeting gone wrong
Retargeting is a form of behavioral targeting that uses cookies to target users who have left a website without converting.
If you’ve ever searched for something online one day, and then noticed it following you around the internet for weeks afterward, this will have been down to retargeting.
While in some cases this form of digital advertising has proven to be extremely effective, it does have its flaws.
For example, you may have changed your mind since you visited the website, or potentially bought the product on the high street already. Worse still, the advert could regard a personal or sensitive product that you’d rather not be reminded of.
Either way, the result is the same: a disgruntled user, which is bad for both advertisers and publishers.
Bad ads
Whereas above we spoke about the effect bad content has on a brand’s digital ads, it can also work the other way. Bad ads can be just as damaging to a brand’s carefully curated content.
The term ‘bad ads’ in the digital world is used to describe digital ads that make for a bad user experience. They could contain offensive or inappropriate content, promote fraudulent products or services, or even spread malware through a practice known as malvertising.
Bad ads are a big deal. To give you an idea, Google blocked and removed 5.2 billion bad ads in 2022 alone. A problem of this scale presents a very real threat.
With the anonymous nature of the programmatic landscape creating the perfect environment for bad actors to distribute this type of ad, you must take the correct security measures to protect your brand’s reputation.
Preventing brand abuse with image security
We believe that securing all imagery associated with your product or service is an essential part of any brand protection strategy. With proper protection in place, it becomes difficult for fraudsters to copy, manipulate, and redistribute your images as their own.
One way to do this is by using image streaming, which enables you to control the online use of every single image you upload.
By using this technology, all your brand’s images can be streamed from a single bank of individual, accredited master copies. This allows you to view a list of every page on which an image is displayed, with the ability to block domains as you wish.
A further advantage of this is that it gives those publishing your images peace of mind, in that they can be sure the images they’re using have come from a reputable source.
Potential abusers of your brand, on the other hand, would face multi-level theft prevention. Dragging and dropping are made impossible while right-clicks are met with image-obscuring copyright messages, and image-scraping bots are also deterred.
Such a strong combination of protection makes it extremely difficult for abusers to gain the imagery they need to impersonate your brand online with any credibility.
Ensuring brand safety through contextual in-image advertising
The risks that come with digital advertising boil down to two things: context and protection. If ads are not displayed in the right context for the brand in question, or if there are insufficient security measures in place to detect and block bad ads, even the most impeccable reputation can be very quickly tarnished.
Contextual in-image advertising is one way to ensure safe and effective online advertising. At SmartFrame, for example, we collaborate closely with image owners and libraries to contextually target in-image ads with complete accuracy.
Advanced technology analyzes the contents of the webpage, the image itself, and the user’s geolocation to build an accurate picture of the environment in which an ad will appear. Ads are then matched perfectly to their surroundings to ensure they’re always relevant.
To complement contextual advertising, it’s important that ad inventory is completely protected from bad ads and vetted to maintain maximum quality.
In summary
Brand protection is a broad term that can cover countless areas, both online and offline, and such scope can make it hard to know where to start.
While image security and contextual advertising alone will not make your brand impervious to harm, they should form a vital part of your overall brand protection strategy. With this in place, you’ll have a strong basis from which to build comprehensive online brand safety.
Learn more: Contextual targeting: How we’re changing the game for online image advertising
Subscribe to our newsletter
Get the latest articles and updates delivered straight to your inbox