On Thursday, 22 September 2022, TIC Council hosted, jointly with Amazon, an exclusive webinar for the TIC Council membership, entitled: "Overview of Amazon Brand Protection”.
The webinar was introduced and moderated by Karin Athanas, TIC Council Americas Executive Director, and was joined by David Pounds, Global Brand Relations Manager on Amazon’s Brand Protection Team. David has worked in Brand Protection for 12 years, joining Amazon from an AMLAW 50 law firm where he was an e-Crime Investigator. David’s prior experience includes serving as Head of Anti-Counterfeiting and Intellectual Property Policy at Walmart, Principal Brand Protection Specialist at Symantec, and brand protection analyst and manager for several brand protection service providers.
As highlighted by Karin Athanas during her introduction, the sale of counterfeit products through online platforms continues to grow. In an attempt to avoid public spaces during the pandemic, consumers turned to online platforms to purchase everyday goods. While convenient, it has resulted in more counterfeit products that may be unsafe reaching consumers. When counterfeiters cut corners to copy popular brands and frequently purchased products, they have been found to also counterfeit the TIC marks found on those products, avoiding the cost of ensuring the safety of those products through testing, inspection, and certification.
In an effort to address this problem, David provided the attendees with an overview of the Amazon Brand Protection program, and specifically how TIC Council members can use the Amazon Brand Registry and reporting process to report sellers and product images on the Amazon platform that infringe on the members’ intellectual properties.
The Amazon Brand Protection program includes automated measures which David reported have resulted in 2.5 million bad actor accounts being stopped before they publish a single listing for sale. Amazon’s program a special offering referred to as ‘Project Zero’ which is available to registered companies whose claims are 90% successful. Project Zero provides those companies with the ability to identify counterfeit product listings and the product listing is immediately removed from the Amazon platform.
Additionally, successful claims through the Amazon Brand Protection system are used to train Amazon’s artificial intelligence, making its automated evaluation of sellers and their listings more effective, further reducing the number of bad actors on Amazon’s platform.
David walks all attendees through the Brand Protection registry process and showed attendees how to report infringing products. He also outlined further enhancements that Amazon is exploring and hopes to make available to participating companies in future years.
During the final Q&A session, David and Karin presented and answered the questions submitted by attendees, at the same time presenting a series of best practices to showcase the best ways to use the Amazon Brand Registry.
If you wish to know more on the Amazon Brand Registry, Amazon has provided TIC Council’s members the Brand Registry Resource Document and the Amazon Brand Protection Report and offered to return for further presentations with members.
We want to hear from you! Reach out to Karin Athanas at kathanas@tic-council.org to share your feedback regarding the following questions:
1. Want to learn more and further explore Amazon’s programs to address counterfeiting? What questions or areas would you like Amazon to cover in a future webinar?
2. Are you a current Amazon Brand Protection Program user?
Check our list of webinars to find about more about TIC Council’s work in providing thought-provoking presentations on the current market trends and legislative developments around conformity assessment.