Marketplace Monitoring 2.0: How data analysis and automation affect brand safety

 

Navigating the world of e-Commerce, especially online marketplaces, is becoming an increasingly complex task for brands. The number of factors to consider when selling products online is growing longer as we speak, with automation, big data, digital marketing, and brand safety occupying the top spots on the list.

 

Online brand protection is similarly affected by this shifting landscape, which is why we need to evaluate how advanced analytics and automation redefine marketplace monitoring and brand safety.

 

Take digital advertising, for example. The sector experiences challenges, like ad fraud, that were unimaginable just a few years ago. A single misplaced ad, e.g., your content appearing on fake news websites, can cost your brand more than the wasted ad money. This is why brand safety is no longer a luxury, but a must-have for brands.

 

Regardless of your industry and company size, your digital strategy now has to include a carefully planned and actively managed brand protection program.

 

 

Marketplace monitoring 2.0

Along with e-Commerce, marketplace monitoring is evolving into a data-driven, more comprehensive approach to brand protection. Automation and data analysis are the driving factors in today’s marketplace monitoring services, creating a powerful foundation for the protection of brands and their reputation.

 

 

The growing complexity of marketplace monitoring

The reasons behind the increasing complexity of marketplace monitoring are manifold.

 

First and foremost, the rising popularity of online shopping incites significant growth in marketplaces and seller networks as well, making them harder to oversee with the traditional approach. The sheer size and reach of global marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba require a shift to more efficient, more diverse, and more data-based monitoring. To this comes the evolution of automation, which is a great tool for solving brands’ key pay points: scale, reaction time, and accuracy.

 

However, automation is a double-edged sword. Automation allows for programmatic advertising, allowing for automatic buying of ad space in the best spots - unless fraudsters exploit the system. And they often do.

 

 

Illustration of a person looking at an online ad on a computer

 

 

Fake websites can masquerade as legitimate websites (also known as domain spoofing), thereby deceiving advertising systems into believing that they are suitable for placing legitimate ads. Similarly, MFAs (made-for-advertising sites) use bots to drive up their traffic and to draw ads in, but since no real humans visit these sites, the ad budget is spent on nothing.

 

In addition, ads can land next to inappropriate content like fake news, extreme opinions, and, in some cases, even criminal content. The resulting reputation damage can range from embarrassing to devastating.

 

All of the above require brand protection experts to move toward centralized, data-driven monitoring ecosystems. Manual takedowns give way to algorithmic surveillance, allowing for more efficient, sharply targeted reactions to IP-infringing marketplace content.

 

 

Brand safety as a strategic task

In a marketing context, brand safety refers to all strategies and measures that ensure that your brand’s digital content doesn’t appear in an undesirable or outright harmful environment. Brand safety measures make sure that your ad campaigns are displayed in legally compliant environments that also comply with your brand values, thus helping you avoid IP infringements and damage to your brand image.

 

Discover how our clear marketplaces solution ensures brand safety on online marketplaces!

 

Brand safety can be divided into two categories: legal safety and brand suitability. Legal safety means that no illegal content is displayed near your brand’s ads, like child pornography, human trafficking, phishing, etc.

 

Brand suitability, on the other hand, includes all other content that is not illegal, but not in line with your brand image. For example, a fast-fashion ad appears next to a brand that commits itself to sustainability.

 

To successfully incorporate both sides of brand safety into your strategy, your brand values must be translated into clear guidelines and included in your technical solutions for brand-specific and effective monitoring.

 

 

Key aspects of brand safety

Your brand safety forms a baseline for all digital risk management measures, which makes it a crucial feature for effective brand protection in today’s versatile, fast-moving e-Commerce environment. But what are the most important elements of brand safety?

 

• Reputation management: ensuring that your brand content doesn’t appear in the vicinity of content that could reflect poorly on your brand. This includes fake websites as well.
• Customer trust: appearing on trustworthy, reputable sites and near content that corresponds to your brand’s values strengthens your customers’ trust in your brand.
• Legal and regulatory compliance: make sure your content complies with all legal requirements. This includes local requirements in specific markets that may differ from your home country’s laws.
• Technological controls: use AI, blacklists, whitelists, and automated monitoring to ensure that your ads are placed in safe, reputable digital environments that correspond to your brand values.
• Brand suitability: check the broader environments of your ads to guarantee that the context aligns with our brand messaging, tone, and audience segmentation.

 

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Data analysis: the intelligence engine behind brand safety

Collecting and analysing data has never been easier. Thanks to AI and machine learning, data analysis has become much faster and more efficient. For example, machine learning significantly increases the efficiency in identifying counterfeit patterns and detecting unauthorized sellers.

 

With predictive analysis, online brand protection experts can examine the collected data and predict future surges in IP-infringing activities before they actually arise. This allows for much faster and more effective countermeasures. In addition, sentiment analysis and anomaly detection provide us with key insights about the emergence of future counterfeiting trends.

 

Moreover, we can offer actionable advice based on structured and unstructured data gathered from online marketplaces worldwide.

 

 

Automation: scaling protection without compromising quality

When it comes to repetitive enforcement tasks, automation is a great way to scale up our operations, e.g., by detecting infringing listings, seller vetting, and issuing takedown requests. However, this latter requires human evaluation, because mass takedowns without careful analysis can do more harm than good.

 

Find out why mass takedowns aren’t the key to successful brand protection!

 

Integrating automation into your CRM and legal workflows has many advantages, including faster and more accurate responses, as well as more efficient resource optimization.

 

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that human intuition can’t be replaced by automation. In fact, industry best practices show that for a truly seamless online brand protection, you need to balance human oversight with automated systems.

 

 

The synergy between data and automation

Data analytics provides the best basis for smart automation rules and efficient workflows. Feedback from these processes should be integrated into the next cycle, creating continuous learning loops to improve detection algorithms.

 

Collecting real-time marketplace intelligence is thus crucial for effective automation processes. Combining such data with automation triggers allows for fast, flexible, and efficient action.

 

 

Measuring the ROI of marketplace monitoring 2.0

Measuring the effects of your actions is important to learn what you’re doing right and what could be further tweaked for even better results. This is why brand owners and managers need data-driven insights to support their decision-making processes.

 

 

Illustration of bar graphs and a pie chart

 

 

However, some effects are easier to quantify than others. For example, easily measurable KPIs for marketplace monitoring are the threat detection rate, response time, and several brand reputation metrics. These can usually be quantified and used for easily readable feedback about your brand protection program.

 

Other KPIs are harder to grasp. Consumer trust, for example, is more elusive when we try to quantify it, and yet it’s one of the most powerful types of feedback a brand can get. Lower legal costs and higher revenue protection are also among the less measurable but highly important KPIs for marketplace monitoring.

 

 

The future: AI-augmented brand protection

Generative AI revolutionizes our lives as we speak, and online brand protection is no exception in this regard. AI helps us with faster counterfeit detection and fraud simulation, as well as anticipating future trends and easier recognition of fraudulent behavior patterns.

 

Other important emerging technologies include graph databases, cross-platform monitoring, and visual recognition.

 

All these contribute to the data-based proactive marketplace monitoring of the future, which is quickly becoming a necessity for brands that want to remain successful and protected in today’s perilous, highly competitive e-Commerce.

 

 

Conclusion

Online brand protection is a continuously evolving industry. Our solutions and services need to adapt to existing threats and anticipate future ones to provide our clients with the best possible protection program.

 

With the help of new technologies and over a decade of intuitive human expertise, we’re ready to meet the challenges that face your brand’s IP rights in today’s global economy. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about marketplace monitoring 2.0, or any other online brand protection issue!