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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#838: BrandShield CEO Yoav Keren on the dark side of digital engagement
00:27:54
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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.
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Today we're going to talk about the
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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.
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C
Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I'd
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like to welcome Yoav Karan, CEO and co founder at BrandShield. Yoav, welcome to the show.
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D
Hi Greg, thank you for having me.
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A
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself
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and your role at BrandShield?
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Sure. So personally, this is my second company that I started. The first company that I started with my co founder is a domain name registrar, the largest domain and registrar in Israel. It's called domain net. BranchID came out of that company. We started it about 13 years ago and company is growing fast, becoming one of the main, I would say service providers 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 Reconnaissance School, Kellogg in Northwest and Reconnai in Tel Aviv. And I was involved in politics in Israel. I was an advisor to a minister for years, so did very different things. But this is definitely my passion in the past over 20 years, this industry and yeah, that's where I am.
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B
Great, great.
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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 want to 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?
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D
Actually, if you ask me, this is something that should as in a overall responsibility, not necessarily from an operation perspective, but in terms of responsibility should sit with the marketing people, the CMOs. And the reality is when you actually look at SMEs, it will usually be something that someone for marketing or from digital or even the C level executives, the CEO. Also in small organizations, they will be the ones that will travel from it. So it's definitely an issue that should sit there. The reason is that it's not there in most organizations that historically these problems were either in the legal side of the business or in this cybersecurity side of the business. But the market and the threats have evolved significantly. And the reasoning go directly to what you were asking is that 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 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.
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C
Yeah.
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So when someone falls for a scam, they blame the brand.
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Yeah.
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D
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 fight. It's actually where people. There'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 will not trust the brand anymore. So you're losing reputation 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's happening? And, you know, you get an overload of calls of people that you don't even have business with them. And that's definitely another effect on the business. So these are things that overall through, from an overview of a marketer as of a company, you should look at that as a risk to any activity that you do.
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Yeah, well, and to the point about the customers, they're gonna in some way blame the brand for their mistake. I mean, some people that are savvy and, or maybe have been through this process before 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 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 trust, even if it's not their fault, is it better education? You know, what should they be thinking about there?
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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 you know, I've, I've been interviewed in different cases and asked about that and people, you know, I've been asked to give tips to consumers. We could go into that down the road, 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. 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 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 fail 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 are able to fight back and decrease the amount of scams, phishing, impersonation, fraud and all these cases.
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And of course AI. You know, AI has done plenty of good things as well. But in this case, you know, there's been a huge surge of AI generated scam storefronts. And you know, we're not just talking about maybe some brands that may not have the resources 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 things like that. Can you maybe walk us through how are these criminals using AI at this scale and what does AI do that maybe more manual threats couldn't do?
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D
Sure. First of all, I think one of the changes that we're seeing, and you've mentioned a couple of brands which we've done a research and saw a proliferation of suspicious domains that were registered around a certain time dropping 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 them.
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Yeah, yeah.
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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 phishing impersonation scam, counterfeit are becoming a problem of almost every company and it is going to be a problem of. And this is, 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 going to happen. I'm being impersonated every day. My team is monitoring my name. We use branch for myself and for Branchfield 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 very reliable, well written text, right? You can create that in minutes. Just you go on a chat and ask the chat to write a marketing page for a certain brand from Nike like you've mentioned. It's very easy. Second thing, so no typos anymore, right? If typos were where you know, if you read about, you went to a website and there were too many typos there looked like someone that doesn't know English or Spanish. If you're a Spanish person and then you say okay, 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 fishing page in that language. You will create a very, very good page very easily with no cost. The second thing is our images. You can create amazing images that look totally real in the style and full 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 deep fakes were off 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. You just, I just show you that, that, that video, you wouldn't know. This is AI. 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 the 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 just all around.
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Yeah.
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So we've talked about the challenges and some things like that. Why don't we talk about the flip side? So in this case, how does a platform like BrandShield use AI to mitigate against this, you know, detect and take down these threats? Like, how does that work?
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D
Sure. So first, you know, Branchial was the first company to introduce AI to online brand protection and digital risk protection. When we launched the company, there was no AI used. Of course, AI is being, this is not a new thing. Right. People that come in tech 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 kind of evolvements. We actually launched new technologies that are based on these new capabilities that are based on these new technologies. They're all proprietary. It's all based on our own 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 cheap thing. So if you do it in masses, branch basically fights AI with AI. Right. So the bad things of AI with AI, that's what we've done all over the years. And with our technology, AI 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 origin patents in terms of predicting and trying to 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 biggest advantages of Brandtville. That's a very high level of detection. Whether these are phishing websites or other websites with content, whether these are social media pages or posts, e commerce platform sales like on ebay, Alibaba and so on, mobile apps, paid ads, and it's basically any type of entity line. The next layer is basically where the core, I would say the core engine of the AI that is the analysis and prioritization part of the system. That's where we use different capabilities for again predictive, generative AI and other capabilities, image related AI capabilities to really understand what, what potentially in a page or a post or 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 learned from in order to develop our AI model that predicts what is the next. Right. What is the next case where if this is related to a scam or not and is this risk a high, is this page is a high risk and then there is the remediation. Now very important to understand that brand shield 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 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. If they host that website or they host that social media account that is impersonating, they do that also there, there's a lot of AI tools that are being involved, a lot of automation also to make this very quick. But there's still a person taking the decision, I think in terms of AI, it's still not there 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 the process, but still leaving the decision to someone and you know, someone in the loop. I think the people are also not there in terms of the customers ready to have a bot that does that. Fully automated. Yeah, it might be down the road, but at the end you need to remember we're taking down stuff. So there also could be mistakes. Now we have a residual amount of cases where 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. Right. So this is, and that's why it was taken 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 High level on a, on a full level. But again this is the evolvement of technologies. This is what we do and it works very well. We get very high level of results. Yeah.
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So you know, we just passed the holiday season, you know, 2025 holiday season and you know, soon enough, 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, that should be most top of mind for those retail marketing execs out there as they plan their campaigns.
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Well, I think that, and this is something that is what we're going to see this year. There's going to be more and more deep fakes. There's going to be more and more social media accounts, paid ads that impersonate the brands are core funnel 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 going to be a competing campaign on your, on, you know, that's bidding 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 a 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 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, you don't know if it's there are there any cases and these things come up and down and they change. And unless you have something that is on an ongoing basis monitoring and enforcing against this, you're being hurt and you're not even aware. Yeah.
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Yeah. Well, Yoav, thanks so much for joining today, really. Definitely brands need to be thinking about this and keeping this front 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?
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D
Well, the way I do that is by keeping a few roles that I did when we were smaller as part of my job. So I am the CEO and I'm involved in different chairman management of the company, but I also lead the product at the company, which is something 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 and D kind of roadmap and make sure that we we are ahead of the bad guys and have a solution there that really services our customers in the best way.
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That's great.
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I love that. Well again, I'd like to thank Yoav Karan, CEO and co founder at BrandShield for joining the show. You can learn more about Yoav and
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BrandShield by following the links in the show notes.
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This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies be put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and
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thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast.
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If you liked the episode, hit subscribe
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and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work or if you need a speaker
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for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com or that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand
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is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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The Agile Brand.