What if your biggest competitor this holiday season isn’t another brand, but an army of AI-powered scammers stealing your customers and destroying your brand equity before you even know they exist?
Agility requires not only building a brand that can pivot with market trends, but also one that can defend its value and customer trust against threats that evolve just as quickly.
Today, we’re going to talk about the dark side of digital engagement, including the rapidly growing threat of brand impersonation, counterfeit goods, and AI-driven scams that target the customers marketers work so hard to attract. This isn’t just an IT security issue; it’s a fundamental threat to customer experience, brand trust, and revenue.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Yoav Keren, CEO and Co-founder at BrandShield.
About Yoav Keren
Yoav Keren has 24 years of experience in financial management, marketing, and business development. He is currently a member of the anti-counterfeiting committee at INTA and was formerly a Council Member at ICANN. Yoav was a senior advisor to a minister in the Israeli government and was the head of the Technology branch of the Israeli military’s Information Security Department. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg & Recanati business school (Northwestern University & Tel-Aviv University) and a BA in Economics and Physics from the Tel-Aviv University.
Yoav Keren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavkeren/?originalSubdomain=il
Resources
BrandShield : brandshield.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlström: What if your biggest competitor isn’t another brand, but an army of AI-powered scammers stealing your customers and destroying your brand equity before you even know they exist? Agility requires not only building a brand that can pivot with market trends, but also one that can defend its value and customer trust against threats that evolve just as quickly. Today we’re going to talk about the dark side of digital engagement, including the rapidly growing threat of brand impersonation, counterfeit goods, and AI-driven scams that target the customers marketers work so hard to attract. This isn’t just an IT security issue, it’s a fundamental threat to customer experience, brand trust, and revenue.
Greg Kihlström: To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Yoav Keren, CEO and co-founder at BrandShield. Yoav, welcome to the show.
Yoav Keren: Hi, Greg. Thank you for having me.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at BrandShield?
Yoav Keren: Sure. So, personally, I am, this is my second company that I started. The first company that I started with, my co-founder, is, a domain registrar, the largest domain registrar in Israel. It’s called Domain The Net. BrandShield came out of that company. We started it, about 13 years ago. And the company is, growing fast, becoming, one of the main, I would say, service providers in the, in our, in our segment, in our industry, in cybersecurity. And, my background is, quite, unique. I’m a physicist and I’m also an economist. I have an MBA from, the Kellogg Business School and the Recanati Business School, Kellogg in Northwestern and Recanati in Tel Aviv. And I was, I was involved in politics in Israel. I was, I was an advisor to a minister for years. So different, very different things. But this is definitely my passion in the, in the past over 20 years, this, this industry and, yeah, that’s where I am.
Greg Kihlström: Great, great. Well, we probably won’t cover physics today, maybe a little bit, a little bit of economics, but, but, let’s, yeah, let’s dive in here and, and I wanna start with the, the from looking at this from the strategic standpoint, and looking at brand protection as really a customer experience pillar. In many large organizations, cybersecurity is kind of siloed in, you know, it’s off with IT or maybe as well as legal department. How do you make the case to a CMO that digital risk protection is actually a core component of brand strategy and customer experience that they need to at least co-own?
Yoav Keren: actually if you ask me, this, this is something that should, as in an overall responsibility, not necessarily from an operation perspective, but in terms of responsibility, should, sit with, with the, with the marketing people, with the CMOs. And, and the reality is is when you, when you actually, look at SMEs, it will usually be something that someone from marketing or from digital or even the C-level executives or the CEO also in, in, in S, you know, in small organizations, that they will be the ones that will trouble from it. So it’s definitely an issue that should sit there. The reason is that it’s not there in most organizations is that historically, this, this, these problems were, either in the legal side of the business or in the cyber security side of the business. But the market and the threats have evolved significantly. And, you know, the reasoning what, you know, go directly to what you were asking is basically, when someone runs a scam or an impersonation or a fraud or a counterfeit sale that is related to your brand, it is basically a competitor to your, to your revenues. So it does directly three news, three things. One, it hurts the bottom line. It’s clear. This is something that was not clear, if you go back five, six years, six years ago. But since COVID, since the, you know, the digital leap, a lot of companies understood, this is hurting our direct, bottom line. Because basically, you’re losing customers that were supposed to buy from you to a scammer. Right. And that revenue doesn’t go to you at any point of time. That’s one. The second thing that is, I think, even more, important, and that is the reputation. Yeah. So when someone falls for a scam, they blame the brand. Yeah. Right. Why didn’t, why did now, they will blame themselves of course in some cases, but at the end, they understand that they fell for something that is related to the brand. And of course, if it’s a counterfeit, it’s also, sometimes very hard because if they did not, you know, in some cases people look for counterfeits, okay? But this is not the case we’re trying to, to fight. It’s actually where people, it’s most of the cases, where people buy counterfeits and don’t even know they bought that. And what they’ll get is a bad product. Right. And in that case, they, they will not trust the brand anymore. So you’re losing reputation this, you’re not, this way or another. Now the third impact on the company is customer service. In many of these cases, the customers will call your customer service and will ask, where’s my stuff, you know, where’s my money? What what’s happening? And, you know, you get an overload of, of, of calls, of people that you don’t even have a business with them and that’s definitely another effect on the business. So these are things that overall from a an overview of a marketer as, of, you know, of a company, you should look at that as a risk, to any activity that, that you do.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, well, and to the, to the point about the, the customers they’re, they’re going to in some way blame the brand for, you know, for their mis, I mean, some people that are savvy and or maybe have been through this process before may, may take a little more responsibility. But, you know, not, not everyone is educated on how to spot counterfeit and and fraud and everything like that. So to your point, there’s a bad taste in their mouth about this brand because of the experience they had. So in a way, whether at least by proxy that brand is is is taking the, the rap for this, right? So, so, you know, how does this, you know, how should CMOs be looking at this, this impact and this erosion on on trust even if it’s not their fault, is it better education? You know, what what should they be thinking about there?
Yoav Keren: No, and I think this is, this is actually a really good point. It has nothing to do with education in a sense. Yeah. Because and and you know, I’ve I’ve I’ve been interviewed in in in in different cases and asked about that and people, you know, I’ve been asked to give uh tips to uh uh to consumers we can go into that uh down the road. but but it is very limited. The truth is, it’s what’s happening right now worldwide. With the explosion of AI and the tools that are now available in the hands of scammers, of counterfeiters, of cyber squatters, cybercriminals in general, it is extremely hard even for a sophisticated user to understand what is real and what is not. And this is the issue. It’s nothing to do with education. I mean, everyone can fall for that. Yeah. And this is an issue, right? This is not we are getting into a very different era. It was not the same a few years ago, two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, of course. It was very different. We are stepping into a into a very different era where this is something that has nothing to do with education and you cannot throw the responsibility on your customers. Hey, if they fell for that, it’s their problem. That’s irrelevant. Because you’re going to lose their trust, you’re going to lose their revenue. And the only way to fight it is use dedicated solutions that that are able to fight back and decrease the amount of scams, phishing, impersonation, fraud, and all these cases.
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Greg Kihlström: And of course, AI, you know, AI has done plenty of good things as well, but in this case, you know, there there’s been a huge surge of AI-generated scam storefronts and and, you know, we’re not just talking about maybe some brands that may not have the resources and and reach to be able to do something, you know, we’re talking about brands like Sephora, Nike, others that, you know, it’s it’s not a it’s not a matter of scale, in other words, that or or things like that. Can you maybe walk us through, how are these criminals using AI at this scale and and what does AI do that maybe more manual threats couldn’t do?
Yoav Keren: Sure. first of all, I think one of the changes that we’re seeing and you’ve mentioned, you know, a couple a couple of brands, that which for we’ve done a research and saw a proliferation of of, suspicious domains that were registered around a certain time, you know, jumping over 100%, and this is usually kind of an indicator of a potential, scam activity that is happening, but it’s just an indicator. It’s not just, you know, it’s just one of the things. Sure. the the the issue that that actually the the the reality shows us today that while this used to be a problem just of the bigger, you know, well-known international brands, right? The the the luxury brands or the big banks, the phishing, impersonation, scam, counterfeit are becoming a problem of almost every company. And it is going to be a problem of, and I this is this is how I see it. It’s going to be a problem of everyone. I don’t know, Greg, if you’ve been impersonated already, but this is gonna happen. I’m being impersonated every day. My team is monitoring my name. We use BrandShield for myself and for BrandShield in order to fight impersonations. This is becoming something that affects, more and more people. And the reason for that is the availability of AI. And what is it, okay? What AI allows now is to create content in a scale that you couldn’t create before at zero cost, okay? First of all, is is very reliable, well-written text. Right? You can create that in minutes. Just you you go on a chat and and ask the chat to write a marketing page for a certain brand, right? For Nike like you’ve mentioned, right? It’s very easy. Second thing, so no no typos anymore. Right? If typos were were were, you know, if you read a bad you went to a website and there were too many typos there, looked like someone that doesn’t know English or uh uh Spanish, if you’re a Spanish person and then you say, okay, that that that that’s weird, right? That’s not. This is gone. Right? This is gone. The other thing of course is language barrier. You don’t need to be English speaking or Chinese speaking or Spanish speaking in order to create the phishing page in that language. You will create a very very good page very easily with no cost. The second thing is are images. You can create amazing images that look totally real in the style and feel and look of the brand. Whether it’s a big brand or a small brand, right? The third thing are videos, deep fakes. They are becoming even more strong. And, I we can go into that and I’m happy to give give an example of one of the cases that we’ve recently, discovered that was more related to drugs where where the the deep fakes were of known doctors. And it looked totally real, you know, a regular person will not, and even even me or you, we if we wouldn’t know right that this is related to a scam, we wouldn’t just I just show you that that that video, you wouldn’t know that this is AI. Yeah. Right? And that is the problem. So, now, all of these can be created in scale in zero cost or very close to zero cost. Now, there are tools there to create websites today. You know, a lot of tools that also allow you to do that very quickly, very easily, at low cost. So, this is why this problem is proliferating and is now targeting a much wider, I would say set of companies and industries and people, you know, just all around.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. So, we’ve talked about the, the the challenges and and and some things like that. Why don’t we talk about the the flip side and, you know, so how does um in in this case how does how does a a platform like BrandShield use AI to uh mitigate against this, you know, detect and and take down these threats? Like how do how does that work?
Yoav Keren: Sure. So, so, first, you know, BrandShield was the first company to introduce AI to online brand protection and digital risk protection. when we launched the company, there were, you know, there were there was no AI used. Of course, AI is being, this is not a new thing, right? People that come in the industry know, AI has been there for a while. There’s different levels of AI. What we’re seeing now is generative AI, predictive AI, it’s it’s it’s kind of involvements. We actually launched new technologies that are based on these new new capabilities that are based on these these new technologies. They’re all proprietary. it’s all based on our own proprietary proprietary AI tools and AI, technology, which allows us actually in a sense to do this very efficiently and very, in terms of a cost, right? AI is not necessarily always a a cheap thing. So, if you do it in in in in in in masses. BrandShield basically fights AI with AI. Right? So the bad things of AI with AI. That’s that’s what we’ve done all over the years. And with our technology, AI is is is used in all the different layers of the technology. The first layer will be the detection. Right? In the detection, of course, we have a lot of detection capabilities that are not necessarily just AI, but there are AI in terms of prediction. This is actually some of our original patents, where we in terms of predicting and trying to to uh uh understand where things might happen and how they will happen and and collect the data, before the others. And that brings us one of the the biggest advantages of BrandShield that’s a very high level of detection, whether these are fishing websites or other, you know, websites with content, whether these are social media pages or posts, e-commerce platform, you know, sales like on eBay or Alibaba and and and so on, mobile apps, paid ads. And, you know, it’s it’s basically any type of of, entity online. The next layer is basically where the core, I would say, the core, engine of the AI and that is the the analysis and prioritization part of the of of, uh the system. That’s where we use different capabilities for again, predictive, generative AI and and uh other other capabilities, image-related AI AI capabilities to really understand what potentially in a in a in a page or a post or, you know, a social media account or a website is whether this is real or not. How related is it to the brand? How risky it is? One of the capabilities here is using data. Right? So we actually the fact that we’ve been in this space with AI for many years, one of our advantages is having a lot of data, historical data that we learn from in order to to develop our our, our AI model that predicts what is the next, right? What is the next case where if this is related to a a to a scam or not and um is this is this risk high um is this page is a high risk? and then there is the remediation. Now, very important to understand that BrandShield is, have a human in the loop. And there’s there’s there’s a person, there’s, an enforcement manager or a threat hunter, that basically clicks the button for, the actual remediation, the actual enforcement against, against the a threat that is out there. We, we don’t attack anyone, right? We collect the intelligence and we submit it to the relevant service providers and they take it down. Right? They they, if they host that website or if they host that social media account that is is is, impersonating, they do that. Also there there’s a lot of AI tools that are are being involved. A lot of automation also to make this, you know, very quick, but there’s still a person taking the decision. I think, in terms of AI, it’s still not there to, to fully do the whole, you know, to have a bot that detects, analyzes, and enforces in one route with no human intervention, with no human decision. What we develop is constantly, you know, minimizing the work that needs to be done by people in in the process, but still leaving the decision to, to someone in, you know, someone in the loop. I think the people are also not there to, in terms of the customers, ready to have a bot that does that fully automated. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it might be down the road, but at the end you need to remember we’re taking down stuff. So, if the there’s also could be mistakes. Now, we have a a residual amount of of cases where we we took down something, that is related to the client. And in those cases, they were cases where the client didn’t know it’s theirs. Yeah. Right? So, this is and that’s why we were taking down. So, but this is not there. I don’t know, you know, probably for some of the cases down the road, you will see bots that will do this on a, you know, a high level on a, on a full level. but again, the the this is the involvement of technology. This is what we do and it works very well. It’s, we get very high level of results.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. So, you know, we just passed the holiday season, the, you know, 2025 holiday season, and, you know, soon enough, I, you know, it’s already on on many retailers’ minds, the the end of of this year. based on what you’re seeing now, what would you say is, you know, the single biggest threat or, you know, most the should be most top of mind for those retail marketing execs out there as they plan their campaigns?
Yoav Keren: Well, I think that, and this is something that that is, is what we’re gonna see this year, it’s gonna be more and more deep fakes, it’s gonna be more and more social media accounts. Paid ads that impersonate the brands are a core funnel to to catch your potential, buyers and move them into the wrong funnel, of, of marketing, which is basically going to a scam website or a counterfeit website or whatever, you know, they’re targeting. And, I think that, if I was a marketer, looking for the next holiday season, I would definitely see that as a big risk for the success of the campaign because that’s gonna be a competing campaign on your on, you know, that’s bidding at the same on your same, customers and you have to fight it and take it down. and more than that, I think if you’re if you’re a marketer of, of an smaller brand, you’ve never thought about digital risk protection or online brand protection, you need to start thinking about that and find, you know, and and look into that issue because there’s a good chance you don’t know and that’s one of the issues. If you don’t have a monitoring tool like BrandShield that proactively goes out there, you don’t know what’s happening. Right? You don’t know if if it’s there, are there any cases? And these things are, you know, come up and down and they change and unless you have something that is an ongoing basis, monitoring and enforcing against this, you’re being hurt and you’re not even aware.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, Yoav, thanks so much for joining today. Really, definitely need need brands need to be thinking about this and and keeping this this front and center. one last question for you before we wrap up here, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Yoav Keren: Well, I the way I do that is by keeping a few roles that I did when we were smaller, as part of, as part of my, my job. So, I am the CEO and I’m involved in different, you know, in general management of the company, but I also, I also lead the product at the company, which is, something, you know, very important that helps me kind of react to what’s happening. But at the same time, I’m also involved with sales. I do a bit of sales and I still manage the accounts of many of the customers that I sold to in the past. So, what it allows me to do is to constantly hear feedback from what they’re seeing, the new trends, the new threats, the things that they’re bothered, about, that they are, seeing or that affects their their their business and quickly in an agile way, get that into our product, into our R&D, kind of road map and make sure that we, we are ahead of the of, the bad guys and have a solution there that really services our our customers in the in the best way.
