Protecting the AIG Digital Brand:
AIG’s Brand Protection Practice and Results
by Meena Sarangdevot, Manager, Digital Governance

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The internet has transformed how consumers engage with brands. It has changed the landscape of marketing strategies and structure. For marketers, the old way of doing business is no longer sustainable.

As more and more marketing dollars are spent on digital channels and customer engagement, managing and protecting an online brand portfolio is a major, non-stop challenge. It is one of the most serious commercial priorities today.

AIG’s digital brand protection strategy plays a key role in protecting our brand, building integrity in market and preventing brand reputation erosion by defending against false association and impersonation on websites, paid search ads, mobile app stores, and social media sites.

We work with a third-party vendor, who utilizes proprietary software to monitor a wide range of Internet properties with sophisticated detection algorithms, including photo detection, graphics recognition and scoring technology, to scan millions of web pages, social media sites, mobile app stores, as well as eCommerce and auction sites, to quickly identify potential brand abuse.

The four digital channels that we monitor are:

Websites (including Keyword Stuffing and Payday Loan Sites): The use of the AIG trademark, logo or copyright content is not permitted by websites that are not owned and managed by AIG or its affiliates. These competing or even illicit sites claim affiliation in order to divert traffic. We monitor for unauthorized use of the AIG trademark in URLs, meta-tags, banners, hidden text and content. During the past year 1,406 unauthorized websites were reported with 81% becoming compliant after enforcement. The industry average for these enforcements in financial sector is 57%.

Paid Search: Abuse occurs when a scammer site hosts paid search ads on Google, Bing etc., often leveraging a well-known brand name in the domain name and have loosely-related ads served to visitors of that search engine. These online ads can also appear alongside organic search results, competing with our marketing efforts. Our enforcement strategy is designed to prevent unauthorized sites from diverting and siphoning our traffic. Today, we have 100% success in the paid search category after enforcing on 5,515 ads during the past year.

Social Media: A social media presence is more important than ever for all digital organizations. As a result, it becomes a priority to protect the brand reputation and message we deliver to our customers using social media channels. We monitor Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, and enforce the take down of unauthorized profiles, pages and videos. During the past year, 625 social media infringements were reported. We have a 69% take down success rate; the industry average is 74%.

Mobile Apps: Mobile apps are big business, and they have also become targets of brand abuse and exploitation. Our mobile app monitoring service monitors this environment and manages our mobile apps centrally so that we can quickly detect unauthorized uses and take rapid enforcement action against them. During a 12-month reporting cycle we were able to identify 167 unauthorized mobile apps and successfully remove 97% of the infringements. The industry average for these enforcements is 74% within the financial vertical.

As a growing digital enterprise, we must be ready to deliver trusted, credible brand experiences across all digital channels, whenever and wherever customers look for them. While we gear up to enhance these experiences for customers, we will continue to protect these experiences from intentional and accidental brand saboteurs to preserve the valuable brand equity and customer loyalty we have built.

To learn more about Protecting the AIG Digital Brand, please contact Meena Sarangdevot at DigitalMarketingSolutions@aig.com.