Welcome Back

I am Jan Maarten Laurijssen, one of the co-founders of Pointer Brand Protection. About ten years ago, we created the first version of our software and I’m immensely proud of how far the entire company has come since then. I currently head Pointer’s operational teams in our company of over 100 people. Personally speaking, catching the bad guys is what drives me every day.

First and foremost, we are a technology company. We collect large amounts of data and with our advanced algorithms we filter out IP infringements. Together with our legal analysts, we make sure the infringing offers are removed. Though removing the listings makes sense, we feel that to really have an impact, brand owners need to develop an online-to-offline strategy. At Pointer, we believe it’s most effective to use the information collected by our software and to apply it in offline actions to hit and disrupt active criminal networks. Monitoring and enforcing are one part of the solution, but platforms such as Amazon and Facebook play a vital role in stopping IP infringements. As a brand owner, you need to have conversations with these intermediaries and make sure they take both proactive and preventive measures on their platforms. Our data provides the insights, seller behaviors, and trends that the brand owners can then leverage during their conversations with the intermediaries. It’s a team effort and involves some cooperation and coordination, but it all works toward the goal of protecting brands and consumers.

Our mission at Pointer is to solve the problem at hand, providing a clean marketplace for consumers to purchase authentic goods from hard-working brands. This is only possible with technology. For a brand, it’s important to tackle this problem from different angles, whether that’s through online channels or through a variety of offline measures. At Pointer, we aim to centralize and streamline all the different strategies available to brand owners. For instance, identifying the large infringers, cleaning up marketplaces, having in-depth discussions with platforms to make sure they take preventive and proactive measures against said infringers, establishing relationships with key authorities all over the world—we use every tool, technology, and resource we can to stop the criminals and establish a clean trade industry.

With a team of over 30 nationalities, we take pride in working in an international and accepting environment where differences are celebrated and embraced. However, we still make it a point to endorse a few key core values at Pointer. One of these core values is ‘Smarter, Better, Smarter,’ which promotes the concept of continuous improvement—something we believe in both professionally and personally. We encourage all of our employees to actively work on personal development—in whatever area they’d like—as well as encouraging the company as a whole to pursue constant improvement in our solutions and software. In addition to this, Pointer employees often feel good about the work they’re doing. We are all fans of the brands we work for, and we take it personally when criminals try to take advantage of these brands.

I believe that innovation and customer-focused development is our key to success. We think that no brand is alike and, therefore, our teams are constantly looking for ways to improve our service and technology to tailor the new developments to each brand. In our software, we implement the most advanced technologies, such as machine learning and image recognition. Our algorithms are set to prioritizing suspicious offers instantly, and thanks to the advancements in machine learning technology, they are self-learning and constantly improving. The better we train them, the better they can train themselves, and the better we can solve the problem.

We make it a point to be involved in the brand protection industry in every possible way, which means participating in relevant conferences and congresses around the world. Based on our involvement with BPC last year—which lead to building new contacts and meeting great people—we thought it would be greatly beneficial to take part in the congress again. We hope to make similarly constructive relationships with brand owners and brand managers while letting attendees know about Pointer’s various solutions and tailor-made strategies.

I have a diversified background in News & Media & Tech companies (fast growing startups within both B2C and B2B), sales, marketing & business oriented. Mother of 3, lives in Stockholm and like to travel.

With my background in startups I really want to emphasize the importance of protect the brand EARLY in the journey, as it can be too late (or become very costly) once you have grown big. It should be part of the nailing down the name (check url availability and trademarks).

One strategy that does not work is to bury the head in the sand and ignore the problems. We believe brand protection should be a topic on a board and c-level.

Corporates need to realize that it is time consuming and costly to make sure the brand is covered in all relevant markets and that this is an on-going operation.
We live in a connected world and the nature of the internet makes the issues global and therefore the protection must be done on a global scale as well.
New technology is very effective to support this at a large extent (at trademark is not covered.

There are two kind of buyers: 1) The ones who make the decision to buy the fake product and is aware about it but does not care. 2) The ones who does not realize that it's fake
The later is a great target for information about how to spot a fake and all the negative consequences it brings. The former one is definitely much harder to convince in the short term.

Internet is not the bad boy here, but it for sure open up lot's of channels and opportunities – since it makes it easier to connect a buyer with a seller.
But the fact that someone wants to capitalize on a successful brand, has existed far longer that the internet.

Education, flat hierarchy and encourage!

We are supporting corporates in their brand strategy by delivering a service that combines a world-leading technology and skilled analysis. By using our service we help our clients in their mission to find and remove online infringements and also support offline actions such as closing down factories, stores etc.

Probably something that includes block-chain.

The platform, known as ZERO, runs on a client customized search that crawls the internet together with lot´s of intelligence that focus on identifying the repeat offenders and listings with highest risk.

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AlpVision is one of the leading suppliers for authentication of products.

Authentication tools with central reporting.

Law enforcement

It is indeed effective.

No general answer to this, ranges from easy to challenging depending on products and markets.

No comment.

I don’t understand how this relates to counterfeiting.

We provide simple and reliable methodologies that enable anywhere in the world to instantly authenticate a product with their smartphone.

I don’t see any big game changer for the 5-10 years. The existing trends will go on: increase of serialization, increase of AI use for authentication and detection of suspect sales, increase of number of ACF suppliers.

Simplicity, track record, reliability, performance, feature invisibility, no manufacturing cost, authentication without network connection.

New prospects

My name is Andreas Mehlhaff and I am since 3 years with U-NICA in the position of Global Account and Channel Management. Due to my multinational background I take care of the following sales regions: Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia and India.

First the brands need to know exactly what product to what extent is affected by the counterfeiters. Only after having analyzed the damage the brand is able to install the appropriate protection strategy.

I personally think that especially digital and webbased protection solutions provide the fastest and most transparent methology to fight this kind of crime. As the brand will be empowered to oversee and monitor the authentication and verification results over the whole world within seconds.

I think that we need to distinguish between life threatening and non-life threatening pirated products. If the consumers are purchasing e.g. food, medicine or automotive spare parts than it is logically very easy to convince them to source originals. In all other cases it will depend on every bodies subjective intention. Many end users even purposely travel to countries and regions in order to buy fake cloths, watches … This always depend on the counterfeited products.

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With our patented scryptoTRACE® suite we provide a very effective product authentication solution. We combine several security technologies in order to provide the highest protection level for customers product. By using our powerful web server platform the brand owner gets a powerful tool to monitor all his products worldwide.

We see a big digitalization trend in the brand-protection market. That’s also the reason why U-NICA is strongly focusing on the digital approach.

We believe that our multi-zone security concept makes us unique. Like in the high-security (ID, Passport) and banknote business we do not rely only on one single security feature. We are able to assign different security technologies to different zones e.g. of a security label or product packaging. All those different protection technologies will be verified with only one app (scryptoTRACE® app). In other words we use a combination of different secure digital anticounterfeit methods in order to drastically increase the overall security level. Beyond that our scryptoTRACE® app can also read all existing standard identification markers like EAN barcode, QR code, serial numbers and so on.

I hope that BPC will bring new leads and customers for our company.

Lella Brauner – worked with in the anti-counterfeit industry for several years and was one of the people behind the start of Yellow Brand Protection in 2010. I am extremely value driven and believe in diversity and equality – which is why CSR always comes first for me.

There is the obvious one; Get your acts together! Make sure to have your patents and trademarks in place and use relevant tools and services to become as efficient as possible. The other one is to think like an infringer or at least dare to examine their reason to success. Is it always about price?

The evolution of brand protection has gone from being a one-man band to a whole orchestra! Many are the people behind the protection of a brand – all of them experts in their own field. It’s when we work together, with skilled people and good tools, that we have the biggest chance to win against the counterfeiters.

I think there is a fair chance that people of today would actually think twice if they knew more about the backsides. If they felt, it wasn’t “only” a brand issue. If they understood what they were actually funding. It is of course a challenge to enlighten them – we are talking about a generation very used to getting what they want – preferably for free. The Spotify generation. I am not saying we should get to them by guilt – but by heart. And I am not saying it is the brands responsibility – but by taking responsibility for the right or greater reasons – the brand can gain much more than “just” protection of the brand. Make it a CSR issue; economic, environmental and social responsibilities – it’s all in there. A perfect alibi. I believe in brand activism. Anita Roddick (founder of The Body Shop) nailed it over 40 years ago!

Well – the digital revolution for sure has changed the world and the way we live and has of course opened up for the counterfeiters. 70% of the counterfeited goods come from the online market. However, the art of counterfeiting is an old one. You need to protect your brand both offline and online.

We want to be the friend a brand protection manager cannot live without by taking the guesswork out of their everyday tasks. Protecting a brand can be a struggle. The enemy (besides the counterfeiter) being time, complex jurisdictions, a nest of emails, spreadsheets and trademark documents shared by all the people involved. Add the fact that BP teams often have to make wonders with a small budget and it is not hard to see that the people protecting the brand are heroes. By providing the BP team with a tool helping them to be in control of all their BP cases, both offline and online – we make them 5 times more efficient.

Smart investigations. 10 years ago, online brand protection was much about trying to close down web stores and domains. Investigations started to become less interesting because the brand owners were tired of spending money on guesses. Then came the whack-a-mole era. No investigations, no litigations – just the frenetic whacking, along with the brand protection service provider boom! I believe this is when something changed. When we realized that whilst whacking – we were actually gaining a lot of really interesting and important data. Bam – the intelligence era! With this excellent intelligence, we can suddenly investigate much smarter! Therefore, I think we will go back to some old school methods – but with better tools to help us.

As I already mentioned – I believe fighting counterfeits is all about taking responsibilities; for your company and staff, your customers and consumers, the environment and for people less fortunate than the rest of us. The down sides of counterfeiting are many. An airbag that failed to save a life. A medical treatment with no effect. A charger that blew up and started a fire. These are the obvious hazards. If we look behind the scenes, we will also find child labour, trafficking, environmental disasters and slavery.

At DH Anticounterfeit we are proud of our tagline: For a Safer world – an umbrella of responsibilities. We are currently supporting the NGO Free the Slaves and their fight against trafficking and slavery.

There are tens of millions of people trapped in various forms of slavery throughout the world today. Researchers estimate that 40 million are enslaved worldwide, generating $150 billion each year in illicit profits for traffickers. Modern slaves are not considered investments worth maintaining. In the 19th century, it was difficult to capture slaves and transport them to the United States. But today, when someone in slavery gets sick or injured, they are simply dumped or killed.

The counterfeit industry is one of the major contributors to both slavery and trafficking.

Together, we can make a difference.

Connecting with people.

- My name is Hermann Haage.
- I am responsible for INCOPRO Sales in the D/A/CH region.
- I am married, 1 child and 1 dog.
- In my spare time I like to cook as a “Hobby Chef” and like travelling to South-East Asia a lot.

- A proper Online Brand Protection Strategy using a tool such as Incopro’s Talisman, this gives brands the ability to scour the internet and find infringing listings from which they can enforce against.
- Many brands, especially larger enterprises will require an offline Brand Protection Strategy.
- Effective coverage of both the online and offline with synchronised efforts on the overlapping data will create an effective overall Brand Protection Strategy.

In the modern world, with the rise of ecommerce now giving businesses access to consumers around the world, it is key to work with a partner who has global coverage in order to achieve set business objectives.

This depends on the consumer at hand, those that don’t intend to buy an authentic product or knowingly make the risk are the ones more difficult to transition into buying genuine goods. Recent market research conducted by Incopro showed that within the last 12 months 25% of consumers knowingly purchased a counterfeit. Those that are misled by counterfeits are better placed to be transitioned into genuine sales, as they are the target consumer and mistakenly believe they are getting a good discount on their chosen product. This can be influenced from effective Marketing which educates consumers and an effective Brand Protection regime to ensure clean distribution channels.

Ecommerce has provided businesses with huge opportunities to grow when they would have previously been restricted by resources and geography. However, the flipside of this is that it has also given counterfeiters an opportunity to cash in. Counterfeiters are often sophisticated criminal networks and it takes an effective brand protection strategy to ensure you minimise the risk of them damaging your business. Whilst the internet has allowed the counterfeiters the opportunity to operate at such scale (with tech platforms particularly culpable), it can not be held to blame. Brands need to be proactive and diligent when protecting themselves online and this will allow them to reap the benefits whilst minimising the risk.

Incopro doesn’t believe in vanity metrics, the key outcome we want for our clients is an immediate and lasting impact. At the centre of this is our clustering technology, this is an intelligence tool that automatically identifies multi-channel infringement networks using multiple datapoints within listings. This uncovers enterprise scale networks and allows for enforcement at scale, meaning you are causing a lasting impact on the infringers, not a minor inconvenience.

Block-chain – this could help manage distribution networks and systems to tackle the issue of Grey Market as the brand owner would have full transparency of where products are located and distributed to 3D-Printing –3D Printing opens the door for all kinds of IP infringements – trade mark, design, copyright and patent. Using simple materials counterfeiters can easily replicate items for a relatively cheap price. Jewelry and glasses are particularly vulnerable categories. The ease of finding these infringements suggests there is a lack of screening employed by the website owners on the 3D models that are uploaded by its users.

Incopro believes there are five key elements to effect brand protection, these are: Data collection, prioritisation, clustering, enforcement and reporting & analytics. These five elements help to create lasting impact on the brands we protect. Our brand protection tool, Talisman, is constantly updated by a team of world-class engineers and takes advantage of machine learning and AI to help identify infringing images and logos along with keywords. This ensures the most comprehensive brand protection available on the marketplace.

- In gaining more connection points with potential future customers.
- Helping to educate the marketplace about the elements that are needed for an effective brand protection strategy.

Prior to creating Verisium, Vadim worked for Lamoda.ru, a major Russian fashion e-commerce shop, where he led digital transformations in the field of omnichannel customer experience. Before that, he was an IT and Management consultant.

In general, there are two approaches that companies should take to protect their brand in terms of anti-counterfeiting. One approach is to restrict sales channels where company products are sold; the other one is to focus on counterfeit prevention and market monitoring. While the first approach is much more simple in terms of brand protection, anti-counterfeiting and supply chain traceability, it has a number of limitations and is not acceptable for a number of companies. But when the company cannot control all its sales channels, it should provide a very simple and reliable way for its clients to check product authenticity. Additionally, the company should monitor all e-commerce platforms, social networks and other web sites to block all suspicious activities. There are a number of companies which provide online anti-counterfeiting services and monitoring for branded merchandise.

I believe that the key metric is that a client can easily find and buy a genuine product.

I believe that it is impossible to make every single person purchase original products, because there will always be people who intentionally buy counterfeit products. But it is possible to provide clients with assurance that what they want to buy is indeed an original (and therefore authentic) item. And this is possible if the company puts forth some effort in terms of customer education about the counterfeiting problem.

The Internet is indeed a big problem for brand protection and anti-counterfeiting, because it significantly decreases entry barriers for illicit traders and makes it possible to sell counterfeit products anonymously. Unfortunately, most companies did not adapt to this fact in their brand protection strategies.

First of all, the leadership of the company must serve as an example and establish uniform rules for everyone within the organization. This is the root of the culture that reigns in the organization. The best way, from our point of view, is to show the importance of it by oneself; that is, show leadership by example.

Our product gives brands a tool to ensure their customers that they are buying the brand’s original and authentic products - and to be able to verify this on their own. Customers value such a relationship and service and they become more loyal. More loyal customers mean bigger sales.

I believe that automation, robotics, the Internet of Things and blockchain technology will be the main drivers of innovation.

First of all, blockchain created a lot of attention about supply chain transparency, and because of all that hype, many investments were made in this technology. Second, blockchain will allow us to ensure data integrity across all the supply chain. In addition, it is possible to connect different counterparties to one system that will be statistically impossible to forge.

We hope to find useful partners, research our competition and meet new clients!

I’m Danae Vara, VP of Product at Red Points, a SaaS company that detects over 400,000 IP infringements every month. I have over 10 years’ experience in the tech industry defining, developing and managing digital products and R&D solutions. Currently, I’m in charge of defining and developing the company's product strategy and portfolio.

The internet came as a new channel with a great impact, providing an open space based on freedom and the dilution of borders. And though this is widely used for a greater good, like bringing us together and allowing us to reach information faster than we could have ever imagined, it has also been used for less well-intentioned goals.
The internet is not the one to blame for crimes, it is just the space where things happen, the guilty ones are those who commit them.
Brands have taken action upon offenders offline for decades, like closing factories, raiding stores and confiscating illegal product on ports, and it shouldn't be any different online.
According to our latest market research, 31% of consumers believe it is the responsibility of the brand to remove fakes online. Therefore, online brand protection is crucial in today’s interconnected landscape and should be part of every brand’s IP protection strategy.
Red Points’ software supports companies on making the most of internet while making it easier for them to protect their brands and customers online.

To be a Red Pointer means much more than to work in the smartest and fastest brand protection company out there.
We are more than 170 Red Pointers, and even though we come from different backgrounds and cultures, we all share the same core values: positivity, agility, proactivity, teamwork and most importantly innovation, transparency, and respect.
We all work together towards the same goal: to make the internet a safer place for brands and consumers. By keeping our goal rooted in our DNA, it is easier for us as a company to walk that path together. We make sure we honor our culture, but also safeguard our clients’ by making sure we protect their creations online.
At Red Points we always say that we do not have problems, we have challenges and that none of us is as smart as all of us together. We always encourage all the Red Pointers to go the extra mile and innovate for the sake of our company and the protection we promise to our clients.

Each brand is different and unique. Therefore, while developing online brand protection strategies, we take into account our clients’ needs to create a personalized and effective plan of action.
In order to develop a global approach, Red Points’ software offers a wide range of technology-based solutions to track legitimate and fake products as well as authorized and illegal sellers online.
We search and gather online data automatically, identify alerts right away and keep track of every infringement so we can act upon them, removing all threats so your brand is protected online at all times.

Red Points’ software automatically identifies online infringements by using cutting-edge technology. Our bots are designed to continuously track the internet to identify any threats. And our platform’s machine learning systems, image recognition technology, automated rules engines and an intuitive case management system are just some of the high-tech tools we use in-house to face online fraud and protect our clients.

We attend all the Brand Protection and Intellectual Property events, conferences or meetups that we can. We believe it’s a great moment to get to know our product, which is helping 400+ companies, and also to listen to the concerns of the brand owners and brand managers about the counterfeit virus that is spreading all around the world.