Brandstrike launch index to track websites responsible for losses

Here's a press release that just arrived - I assume I have been given it in order that I might share it with my reader(s) ... The heading was rather long and breathless so I have removed all the bits that served only to stake claims to intellectual property. Note the patent pending and the (unregistered) trade mark, which looks to me as if it might take a while to acquire a strong enough secondary meaning to justify the TM symbols.

Businesses frustrated with an inability to pinpoint websites responsible for revenue and reputation loss will get a helping hand this month as brand protection services company, Brandstrike launches its revolutionary Revenue and Reputation Risk Index™ (RRRI™).  [Should there not be another R in there, for "Revolutionary"?]

The patent pending technology behind Brandstrike’s RRRI™ is the first of its kind to give rights holders the information they need to be able to focus on those websites that are actually causing real revenue and reputation loss. It transforms the current approach, which calls for a mass targeting of thousands of sights [such as the Tower of London, the Palace of Westminster, and other places that attract sight-seers, no doubt] in the hope of catching the culprits in the net, with a seamless, integrated and speedy solution.

Part of Brandstrike’s new IPCurator online brand protection solution, the Revenue and Reputation Risk Index™ (RRRI™) does all of the hard work for the rights holder, working out which infringing sites are getting the most traffic and then ranking them accordingly. It assigns a number to each website based on their search engine ranking results, making it possible to identify which infringing web sites are being visited by the largest number of consumers. This means enforcement resources can be appropriately and quickly directed at the offenders.
Damian Croker, CEO of Brandstrike said, “Marketing departments spend large sums of money to ensure that their company’s web site appears at the top of search engine results, so that consumers buy their products rather than those of their competitors.  It is well-known that the higher a brand’s rank on a search engine page, the more website visits it will get.  A whole industry has sprung up around this concept, called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

“Counterfeiters that [or "who", as we say in British English] sell on the Internet have developed very good SEO skills and can register a domain name one week and be on the first page of a large search engine, such as Google, the next. Those counterfeiters are increasingly moving away from .com top-level domains (TLDs) and are now moving to country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) such as .co.uk, making monitoring and enforcement on generic TLDs (gTLDs), such as .com registrations, only a part of the challenge.”

Performing a search using a local search engine does not reveal which websites are appearing in the search results of consumers in other countries, because search results are specific to the geography of the searcher.  Therefore, the counterfeit web sites that a brand owner is able to remove or force to a lower rank on a given search engine are not necessarily the ones causing lost revenue and reputation in other parts of the world.

Current online brand protection solutions are mostly based on ranking engines, such as Alexa, coupled with search results from a single search engine such as Google.  Some might employ algorithms that include other factors, but until Brandstrike’s RRRI™, none could accurately identify which websites are receiving the most visitors around the world and are therefore the ones causing the most revenue and reputation loss.

The cutting-edge Revenue and Reputation Index™ is one element of Brandstrike’s new IPCurator online brand protection solution. The system is designed to focus limited resources to get the maximum return on effort. By making monitoring easier, IPCurator and The Revenue and Reputation Index™ facilitate better policing of brand infringement and faster response times to infringements, reducing the revenue and reputation risk potential. Suitable for companies large and small, IPCurator includes a domain name watch function which acts as an early warning system. This system alerts brand holders if anyone attempts to register a domain name anywhere in the world containing the brand itself, further reducing the risk of lost revenue and reputation.

To find out more about Revenue and Reputation Index™ and IPCurator, visit http://www.brandstrike.com

It sounds like a very useful tool for trade mark owners working out how to deploy their resources. The press release also tells us a little about the company, including:

We have the largest associate law firm network in the world spanning over 200 countries/territories. This enables us to investigate and enforce our client’s [sic] rights wherever abuse is detected.

That sounds like a lot of trouble to go to when you only have one client. Presumably they have paid good money to a PR agency to give me some entertainment.