Tell us about your role at MarkMonitor and how you got here. What’s the most fascinating aspect of being a part of an analytics firm?

Having worked for several other companies in a variety of marketing roles, I then joined MarkMonitor around 11 years ago to establish marketing in Europe. This saw me responsible for all aspects of strategy, direction and lead generation and communications covering the full marketing mix. This expanded into a global role over time and as of October last year, I’m now the Vice President of Marketing for the MarkMonitor brand within Clarivate Analytics.

The most interesting part of my job is getting to really understand the challenges that brand owners face in maintaining a trusted brand presence online, and then learning how to mitigate each of those challenges. Using analytics to overcome the unique issues faced by each of our customers is a fascinating and rewarding task.

Given the changing dynamic of marketing analytics landscape, where do you see MarkMonitor/Clarivate Analytics fitting in a CMO’s stack?

Our solutions/services can empower CMOs with the ability to not only monitor their team performance in terms of building a brand but also how they can understand the importance of protecting that brand through the use of an intelligent domain strategy. This ensures their buyer is safe online and reinforces the strength and credibility of their brand, reducing the accessibility of counterfeit goods and delivering a high-quality brand experience.

What is the ‘State of B2B Data-driven Branding’ in 2018? How does MarkMonitor compete against other brand protection platforms?

Brands have a customer-centric approach to many things, which is why MarkMonitor believes it makes sense to adopt this philosophy when it comes to brand protection. Ultimately the purpose of a brand protection strategy is to protect the business and safeguard the consumer, and we believe encouraging a customer-centric mindset is the most effective way of achieving this. The most significant way of adopting this approach is to take the fight against infringement to the front lines — online, where it most impacts the customer — while focusing on the instances that have the potential to cause the most damage. It’s also important to be able to see exactly what the consumer sees when they’re searching for goods/services online. This often includes making the most of geo-variations to identify fraudulent/counterfeit activity according to the country or even city.

How should companies better prepare their brand protection strategies?

The process of successfully managing an online brand protection strategy has changed drastically in a short space of time. However, while the challenge may have increased, it is not insurmountable.

The most important thing a brand can do is to ensure it is established well in the online environment. By securing all intellectual property, including trademarks and domains, in all locations, businesses can put themselves in a much better position when it comes to enforcing in their jurisdictions. This also applies to the world of social media – handles, usernames and more all need to be verified.

As mentioned above, it’s also vital that your brand is focusing on dealing with the highest value targets across the internet. While these might be on social media or online marketplaces, they could also be hiding on the deep and dark web — every potential channel must be considered.

What does your ‘Ideal Customer’ Profile look like? Which industries are best suited to benefit from MarkMonitor?

We work with all kinds of companies across all industries, including 60% of the Fortune 100 and all 10 of the 10 most-trafficked global brands. We don’t limit ourselves by sector – rather, we work with any brand that is worth protecting.

Which markets and geographies are you currently targeting?

We do not place emphasis on particular markets or geographies – our focus is always global.

What new technologies in marketing and advertising fascinate you the most? What are your thoughts on the future of ‘AR/VR/Video’ and their role in branding?

AR and VR both have huge potential to shake up how brands market and position themselves in an ever-crowded landscape, and there already are some great example out there of brands using these technologies in clever and thoughtful ways. However, for all this potential, there are also downsides for brands, as both technologies can be used to display fake information to consumers, or even to link them to counterfeit web pages. This threat will only increase as the popularity of these technologies grows, and so brands need to consider this and factor it into their brand protection strategies to avoid being caught out.

Aside from this, we think that blockchain technology could enable new business models that could positively impact piracy trends. There are already examples of this technology being used to broker transactions between rights holders and those consuming the unauthorized content. Therefore, if we can make use of the verifiable nature of Blockchain it might be possible to establish the precise version of a piece of content being pirated, then to identify the authorized rights holder and connect the two parties together.

What marketing and sales automation tools and technologies do you currently use?

We use Eloqua and Salesforce.com to ensure that we have a strong link with our sales teams and our marketing campaigns; this gives us the ability to really understand our customer and prospect journey and ensure they are being served content that is truly relevant to them. The combination also allows us to be truly data-driven in the decisions that we make.

What are your predictions on the most influential disruptions in Brand Safety and Data Privacy regulations?

It goes without saying, but the enforcement of GDPR is going to have a huge impact on brand safety and data privacy, which will also affect our services and solutions as a result. The most significant consequence of this will be the impact on the WHOIS domain search website. In late May, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved a Temporary Specification for the display of WHOIS data. Registries and registrars are required to follow this specification which allows registrars and registries to mask all registrant data, regardless of whether the registrant is a resident of the European Economic Area or not.

However, until an accreditation and access model – which gives the relevant authorities and brand protection organisations access to the full list of data that’s hidden behind the wall – is in place, brand protection experts will have to send complaints to the registrar abuse contact or file court actions to get access to the masked WHOIS data.

In response to this, MarkMonitor has developed a technology solution, which is an expansion of our current website scanning technology, and will act as an alternative to WHOIS in the likely event that it does indeed ‘go dark’.

Thank you, Chrissie! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.