Bleeding started in sales
For years the DOPE team didn’t know the impact of fake products on their business, in terms of sales. In fact, Chief Financial Officer Edan Boukai told us that they first saw counterfeiting as unavoidable, but also a sign of their success.
It wasn’t until after they tried Red Points’ solution for a couple of months, and were able to remove over 11,000 infringements from more than 22 marketplaces and websites, that he realised his first impression about the issue was wrong and that the impact was “upward in the millions”.
“You do the math,” Edan told us. “For years we’ve tried to monitor and enforce our brand through lawyers. The costs were astronomical, and the results were nothing close from what we’ve got with Red Points.
Legal fees became a barrier
DOPE’s first reaction to mitigate brand abuse through traditional IP enforcement is a path that many of Red Points’ clients have chosen before turning to technology.
The conventional method of brand protection doesn’t have the speed or capacity to deal with the sheer volume and spread of threats that come from the online sources. “It’s a digital issue, and it should be dealt like one”, Edan emphasises.
IP law firms search for infringements manually, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Also, they enforce mainly by sending cease and desist letters and court actions, which can also be a slow process. When a brand is by counterfeiting, especially a famous and trending one, the problem grows exponentially, so speed is key in brand protection. Technology is more measurable, more effective and efficient in detecting, validating and enforcing IP infringements online; that’s why Red Points managed to bring DOPE incomparable results in brand protection.
The secret ingredient
The secret to Red Points’ cost-effectiveness and high productivity relies in its machine learning and image recognition capabilities.
After DOPE signed their contract with Red Points, they were assigned a personal account manager, who worked with the DOPE team to learn about their assets and Intellectual Property. The DOPE team, in turn, were shown how to use Red Points’ dashboard effectively. Information about the assets, IP and the knowledge the DOPE team had already gathered about counterfeits was uploaded to our platform – this is the first step in the machine learning process.
Red Points is able to improve its detection and enforcement because its software learns from each incident in the account’s history. This allows Red Points’ account managers to include new keywords that have been suggested by the software, find opportunities in infringement detection, and identify rules that will make brand protection even more effective. The system becomes more efficient with each detection and requires an ever decreasing amount of staff time.
Edan recommends that any trending company that finds an online counterfeit problem to act fast. The more abuse multiples online, the worst are the effects on the business sales and reputation.
