This article was based on the interview with Red Points’ Daniel Shapiro on brand protection in a deepfake world by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As marketing leaders, we are the architects and stewards of our brands. We pour millions into crafting the perfect customer journey, optimizing every touchpoint, and building a narrative that resonates. We meticulously measure sentiment, track engagement, and fight for every tenth of a percentage point in conversion rates. Yet, there’s a parallel digital economy operating in the shadows, one that leverages the very platforms and technologies we use, not to build our brand, but to dismantle it, one counterfeit product, one impersonated social media account, and one fraudulent website at a time. This isn’t a peripheral issue for the legal department to handle anymore; it’s a frontline marketing problem with a direct and devastating impact on the customer trust and lifetime value we work so tirelessly to secure.
The conversation around brand protection has fundamentally changed. What was once viewed as a defensive cost center, a game of legal “whack-a-mole,” is now a strategic imperative for growth and customer retention. The sheer scale and sophistication of modern threats, supercharged by AI, have made it clear that a passive approach is no longer viable. In a world where fraudsters can spin up a perfect clone of your e-commerce site in a few hours, the integrity of your brand is a fluid, dynamic asset that requires constant, intelligent defense. This is the new reality of brand stewardship, and it demands that we, as marketing leaders, step up and take ownership. To explore this critical evolution, we draw on insights from a conversation with Daniel Shapiro of Red Points, an expert who has spent over 16 years on the front lines of this digital battle.
The C-Suite Hand-Off: From Legal’s Problem to Marketing’s Mandate
For decades, the responsibility for brand protection sat squarely in the domain of the general counsel’s office. It was a matter of intellectual property—trademarks, patents, and copyrights. The primary function was to file the correct paperwork and send cease-and-desist letters when an infringement was discovered. But as the digital marketplace has exploded, the nature of the threat has shifted from a legal nuisance to a direct assault on the customer experience. This has forced a necessary and overdue re-evaluation of who owns this problem. As Shapiro notes, the center of gravity is moving decisively toward marketing.
“We have about 1300 customers that we represent all over the globe. And I was shocked actually when I looked up the data from our our own internal…factor, but about almost 40% of our customer contacts that we have at brands, um, are have a nexus to marketing… I think the driving factor is that customer trust, that brand reputation, managing, you know, potential negative reviews that come out of buying counterfeits or consumer harm.”
This shift is not just organizational shuffling; it’s a strategic recognition of what’s truly at stake. When a customer receives a poorly made counterfeit cosmetic that causes a skin reaction, or a baby product with a small part that poses a choking hazard, their first reaction isn’t to consult a patent attorney. Their reaction is to lose faith in the brand they thought they were buying from. The damage isn’t to a legal filing; it’s to the carefully constructed brand promise that marketing owns. As the orchestrators of the customer journey, marketers understand that trust is the ultimate currency. When that trust is broken by a fraudster exploiting your brand’s good name, the fallout lands directly on marketing’s core KPIs: customer loyalty, lifetime value, and brand equity.
The Tangible Cost of an Intangible Threat
It’s one thing to talk about the erosion of brand equity in the abstract. It’s another to see the direct, quantifiable impact on your customer base. The most insidious part of brand fraud is that customers often don’t blame the anonymous seller on a third-party marketplace or the slick-looking fake website. They blame the brand itself for not protecting them. This isn’t just a perception issue; it translates into lost customers and revenue. Shapiro shared a startling statistic from a consumer survey that should serve as a wake-up call for any marketing leader.
“We did a survey last year of about 2000 consumers in the US who either intentionally or unintentionally bought a counterfeit… When we asked the people, specifically those who unintentionally ended up with a counterfeit, who do you hold responsible and would you continue to buy from the brand? 29% said they actually think the brand’s fault, it’s the brand’s fault that they bought a counterfeit. And they would no longer buy from that brand because of that… Can you imagine a marketing team learning that a counterfeit impact could cause 30% of your consumer base not to come back?”
Let that number sink in. Nearly one-third of customers who have a bad experience with a counterfeit product will not only blame your brand but will actively stop buying from you. In a world where we fight tooth and nail to reduce churn by a single percentage point, the idea of willingly ceding 30% of a customer segment to fraudsters is unthinkable. This reframes the entire ROI conversation. Brand protection is no longer just about preventing a few lost sales to counterfeiters. It’s about preventing catastrophic, long-term damage to your customer base. The investment in a proactive brand protection strategy isn’t an expense; it’s insurance against a massive, measurable loss of market share and customer lifetime value.
Fighting Fire with Fire: The AI Arms Race
The reason this problem has scaled so dramatically is that fraudsters are early and enthusiastic adopters of technology. The same AI tools that help a small business quickly build a professional website or generate ad copy can be used by bad actors to create thousands of fraudulent listings and cloned sites. The old manual approach of having a team search for and report infringements is like bringing a squirt gun to a forest fire. To combat AI-driven threats, brands must deploy their own sophisticated AI-powered defenses.
“If the bad guys are using AI, we need to use AI. Brands need to use AI and these sophisticated tools, because the battle is real… we need to change the game. We need to use AI as a strengthening tool to allow us to identify how are these bad actors circumventing detection… there’s seller networks across multiple platforms, and if we can identify that with AI, we can make this effort, you know, much easier.”
This is where brand protection truly enters the MarTech stack. It’s about leveraging technology to move from a reactive “whack-a-mole” posture to a proactive strategy of network disruption. Modern brand protection platforms use AI to scan billions of data points across marketplaces, social media, and the open web, not just looking for a counterfeit product, but identifying patterns of seller behavior, interconnected accounts, and hidden networks. By identifying the source, you can neutralize dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent sellers at once. Furthermore, Shapiro points to an even more advanced application: revenue recovery. By using AI to identify large-scale counterfeit operations, brands can initiate legal action that freezes fraudsters’ funds, turning a defensive cost center into a program that can, in part, fund itself.
The Ecosystem Imperative: Victory Through Collaboration
The sheer scale of the digital marketplace—with, as Shapiro mentions, two to four billion new items listed daily—makes it impossible for any single brand to tackle this problem in isolation. The future of effective brand protection lies in a collaborative ecosystem approach, where brands, technology providers, online marketplaces, social media platforms, and even payment processors work in concert. An isolated brand protection team, no matter how skilled, simply cannot keep up.
“Long gone are the days that a brand could do this without bringing in some sort of technology. And brand protection teams inside brands trying to do this in this isolated version, just won’t work… What we can do is bring in the platform, bring in the brand, say, here’s all the things we’ve been taking down, and we want to share some information with you, the platform, and can you use your AI and technology to prevent many of these listings from ever showing up?”
This represents a new kind of leadership challenge for marketers. It requires building bridges—not just internally between marketing, legal, and IT, but externally with partners who were once seen as passive channels. By sharing data on bad actors with platforms like Amazon, Meta, or Alibaba, brands can help them refine their own AI detection models, preventing fraudulent listings from ever going live. It’s a symbiotic relationship where everyone benefits. The platform maintains a cleaner, safer environment, and the brand protects its customers and its equity. This requires a shift in mindset from viewing platforms as part of the problem to engaging them as essential partners in the solution.
In the end, the integrity of the brands we build is our most valuable asset. The digital landscape has opened up unprecedented opportunities to connect with customers, but it has also created vulnerabilities on a scale we’ve never seen before. Ignoring the threat of brand fraud is no longer an option; it’s a direct abdication of our responsibility as marketing leaders. The tools and strategies exist to fight back effectively, but it requires a fundamental shift in how we approach the problem. It requires us to see brand protection not as a tax on doing business online, but as a core investment in the trust and loyalty that underpins all of our marketing efforts.
The fraudsters are organized, technologically advanced, and relentlessly profit-driven. Our response must be more so. By embracing our role as the primary defenders of the customer experience, by leveraging AI to move from reaction to preemption, and by fostering a collaborative ecosystem, we can protect the value we create. The battle for brand integrity is being waged right now, on every screen and in every shopping cart. It’s time for marketing to lead the charge.
