By GARETH MACKIE

www.edinburghnews.com
Thursday 13th June 2002

ONLINE security. The words immediately bring to mind images of shady characters, probably spotty teenagers hunched over a keyboard in their bedroom, hacking into websites to steal your credit card details.

But as the internet, and our attitudes towards it, have matured, so have the methods employed by those intent on making a fast buck. Instead of stealing from individuals, many have set their sights on stealing from large companies by misusing their brands.

Steve Leach, managing director of Edinburgh-based Brand Intelligence, gives an example: "One particular high street retailer [who has insisted on anonymity] found there was a website that looked identical to theirs and had a very similar address.

"This bogus site was selling the company’s clothes at a fraction of the retail price. It had a team of telesales people to take the orders and, believe it or not, the clothes were actually being delivered to customers.

"It turns out this particular retailer was manufacturing its clothes in the Far East, but it was actually making ten per cent too much. The remainder were being sold on through this other website."

Brand Intelligence was founded by Mr Leach and Heather Luscombe in 1997, employing just three staff. The firm now employs 14 people, with offices in Edinburgh, London and Madrid, and boasts a list of clients that includes Sony PlayStation, Pfizer, Weetabix and the Scottish Executive.

Next month it launches a new service that will collate information from the internet and highlight any potential risks to a brand, and clients will receive a report advising them of what action to take.

Mr Leach says: "Six years ago, people were spending millions of pounds on websites, but no money was being spent on attracting traffic to those websites."

Nowadays, however, search engine optimisation has picked up a negative image because countless competitors have set up services that range from the highly successful to the downright useless. Some search engine optimisation companies are still "stuffing" their clients’ sites full of irrelevant keywords or brand names belonging to a competitor. Mr Leach says: "Any site that has anything to do with vacuum cleaners can bid for the term ‘Dyson’, meaning that a search for Dyson vacuum cleaners on a site like espotting.com probably won’t return the official company site at the top of the results.

"Instead, the site that has paid the most money for listing will come top. Not only is this inconvenient for companies such as Dyson, it is a form of ‘cyber squatting’ and can lead to a less than satisfactory search experience."

So Brand Intelligence has now turned its attention to the protection of clients’ brands in the online environment, developing software that can search for companies’ names and logos to make sure they are not being misused.

It works with T2M, the specialist e-commerce division of Scots law firm Tods Murray. Partner Lynn Beaumont says: "The downside of the information highway is that there are still some Dick Turpins on it."

She says the Dick Turpin effect could manifest itself in many ways, with metatags being one of the most fiendish. Metatags are words hidden in the coding of a website and picked up by search engines. But using competitors’ names in metatags can be a trademark infringement.

Brand Intelligence has developed software that can spot a company’s name in a sentence, and can identify whether positive or negative words are being used in the same text. "For example, it can spot swearing within three or four words either side of their name," says Mr Leach. "Companies want to know how they are perceived. But they’re not just looking for the negative, they’re looking for positive feedback too."

Mr Leach says his firm has two types of potential client - those that do not realise there is a threat to their brand, and those that have spotted a threat but do not know what to do about it. Once a threat has been identified, Brand Intelligence will work with legal firms such as Tods Murray and issue a cease and desist order telling the offending website to remove any references to the brand.

"We not only identify a problem, but we can rectify it too," Mr Leach says. "Once an infringement has been spotted, a website could be removed from a search engine’s listings within seven days, and even removed from the internet altogether. We’re not heavy-handed though. We don’t go charging in without acting on legal advice."

He says the main risks to a firm’s brand include the unauthorised use of its logo or name, the unauthorised sale of its goods, diverting users away from legitimate websites and piracy of products such as software, music and videos.

With an ever-increasing number of web addresses becoming available, such as .info, .shop and .biz, he says companies are naive if they do not buy them all. "The most important thing to do if you want to develop your brand online is buy all the domain names."

While keeping up with the increasing amount of domain names could be a headache for companies, he says there is an advantage in that web addresses will become devalued.

But in the meantime, a few unscrupulous characters will keep registering web addresses in the hope that companies pay through the nose for them. When the Bank of Scotland merged with the Halifax last September to create HBoS, it found the web address hbos.com had already been registered, forcing it to use hbosplc.com as the address for its corporate website.

Spokesman Mark Hemmingway says: "We’re happy enough with hbosplc.com, and there are links from our other websites, so we have no plans to buy hbos.com."

"The protection of our brands is paramount, because both the Bank of Scotland and the Halifax are trusted, respected and well known. The overriding requirement is to protect the brand at all costs because that’s basically our reputation.

"We trawl through internet sites to see what people are saying about the organisation and would react accordingly if anything being said was damaging. In the past we have taken legal action to protect the brand, because it’s our greatest asset."

Mr Hemmingway admits some people will unwittingly infringe trademarks, but once the problem is pointed out they usually rectify the situation. "But others are after a quick buck, which we saw at the start of the internet age when people used to register a whole host of names," he adds.

"You have to take legal action with those people, because a lot of the problem is to do with customer perception. If users deal with an organisation with the word Halifax in it, they automatically think it’s part of our group."

Mr Leach says we may be witnessing an end to the "Wild West" days of the internet, when there were few rules and little enforcement. "There needs to be some form of governing body for the internet," he says. "But not just that, the web hosting companies need to take responsibility too. For example, the city of New York sued Yahoo for advertising gambling on its site, because gambling is illegal there."

And Mr Leach says Brand Intelligence, given its role as an internet "detective", has to be more responsible than most. "We had to be very careful when we were promoting Miller beer on the internet to make sure the online ads could not be seen in Saudi Arabia."