2022: Insights and actions at scale – to protect your brands and consumers online

Welcome from Simon Baggs, President, Brand & Content Protection @ Corsearch

I’m writing to all our valued customers to kick off 2022 with some reflections on the scale of our work with you in 2021 and some highlights for enhancements that we are making in the year ahead.

If you have feedback, requirements or thoughts to share with me or the team, I’d love to hear from you. Please do get in touch with us here.

Insights and action at scale

We are stronger when we work together to drive change and when we speak with a loud voice. We are proud to lead the market with innovation and thought leadership and look forward to leveraging our strength on your behalf in 2022.

In 2021, we worked with you to:

• Protect over 1,400 brands;
• Remove over 14 million harmful listings from online platforms;
• Remove over 2.2 million illegitimate sellers from online platforms;
• Protect over $5tn of annual revenue.

I mention below some of the ways we plan to continue to use our scale and depth of data to shout louder on your behalf in the year ahead.

Solution-led offerings for your brand needs

In 2022, we will release some further specific data driven solutions to the market – we are listening to your feedback and our focus is on delivering further solutions that target particular issues that you are facing – supporting you in understanding and tackling the breadth of the online challenge faced by your business.

We will be further addressing:

• Consumer harm and safety – targeting negative brand and product experiences across the online ecosystem;
• The prevalence of targeted promotion through social media and direct selling websites;
• Emerging platforms and new threats to your consumer experience.

We look forward to sharing more with you about our forthcoming solutions in a further communication next month.

“We are proud to partner with you – to use data and insight to protect your brands, products and consumers. We will use our scale and depth of data to help you assert control over the rights that your business has worked so hard to create”.

Simon Baggs, President, Brand & Content Protection @ Corsearch

Creating change with INSYNC and thought leadership

This year we will again host regular discussion forums so that brands who face similar challenges can learn and benefit from each other’s experience. Our flagship INSYNC event will move to in person again and we will also publish a further data-driven whitepaper to support your efforts to drive positive change from online intermediaries.

Tangible results: We use data driven whitepapers to push for change. A study targeting search engines was followed by a change in Google’s policy to allow brand owners to remove individual URLs for counterfeit goods from search results.

Our study on repeat infringement showed how platforms could do more to stop persistent offenders, who are responsible for as much as 24% of the counterfeiting problem.

Our 2022 whitepaper will focus on website enforcement, specifically un-responsive website hosts. If this is a particular issue for you and you’d like to be involved in pushing for change, please reach out to Michael Sweeney who is coordinating this work.

“As prior campaigns have shown, platforms are willing listen so long as they are presented with compelling findings and – crucially – objective data. Standalone websites continue to present a potent threat, as hosts and registrars ignore enforcement notices. Our campaign for 2022 will expose this with data insight to support your efforts to secure change.”

Michael Sweeney, Director of Service Delivery and Senior Legal Counsel @ Corsearch

Get involved? If you are not already an INSYNC member, you can sign up here.

Continued investment in technology

We are extremely proud of our Talisman and ZERO platforms, and this year our market leading investment in technology continues. We will bring together the strengths of both systems, adding innovative functionality – to create one single optimised platform for your brand protection needs, combining:

• ZERO’s efficient workflows and data gathering breadth
• Talisman’s strengths in data mining and data extraction.

Our customers will be able to find, act and prioritise more quickly and effectively than ever before. As always, we want to hear from you about what you want to see, so please contact Helen Saunders if you would like to discuss our product plans and your needs.

“We are excited to bring you the next generation of brand protection platforms to give features and insights at the very cutting edge of brand protection technology. I would love to speak to all customers who have ideas or suggestions to shape the evolution of this platform.”

Helen Saunders, Head of Brand Protection Product @ Corsearch

New teams and initiatives to support you in 2022

We’re making a number of changes to our teams this year to better support your needs:

• Increased focus on platform relationships and standardized enforcement procedures: A dedicated enforcement team led by Joseph Cherayath will drive best practice and further our work with law enforcement agencies and online platforms and other intermediaries. In our recent INSYNC survey, brand protection leaders fed back on the importance of working with online platforms and we are excited to dedicate resource to this effort in the year ahead.

• Please reach out to Joseph Cherayath to find out more about our plans.
• Sector-specific customer success: Our focus on customers is core to our business. We are rolling out a customer success team for Brand Protection – to continue our focus on excellence in technology and service delivery and to drive insights through targeted working groups – acting on your feedback that you value collaboration and sharing best practice.

• Please reach out to Annie Wood, Director of Customer Success, to hear more about our plans.
• Extending our partnerships with law firms: Stuart Durham heads up our work with law firms and other expert partners. Our technology and investigative teams support law firms with data, targeted investigations, evidence support and expert witness testimony and we are proud to work with law firms to support their client service.

• Please reach out to Stuart Durham, VP of Alliances and Partnerships, to learn more about our plans for this year.

Corsearch is committed to supporting you in protecting your rights, revenue and reputation. The team and I look forward to working with you on our exciting initiatives this year – continuing to work together to make the Internet better for business and consumers.