Get to Know Shield Marketing

_{Authors: Gustavo Mariotto, Diego Daminelli – São Paulo, 11/28/2024, 12:25 PM.}

Shield Marketing is a strategy that protects brand performance through continuous monitoring, proactive actions, and threat analysis in the digital environment. The focus is to ensure that brands are safeguarded against traffic abuse, brand violations, and scams that could compromise their reputation and return on investment (ROI) in marketing campaigns.

Unlike traditional brand protection, which is often reactive and centered on legal disputes, Shield Marketing takes a proactive, results-driven approach, addressing threats quickly and effectively. It not only protects brand assets but also aims to enhance campaign performance by ensuring that harmful practices such as traffic diversion and brand misuse do not impact results.

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Key Components of Shield Marketing

1. Traffic Shielding: Protects brand traffic from diversion by competitors, SEO hijacking, keyword cannibalization, invalid clicks, and fraud in paid ad campaigns.
2. Brand Shielding: Fights brand infringement on search engines, marketplaces, and social media, where brand terms and images are misused. It also addresses scams such as phishing domains and fake ads.

‍These two pillars are supported by the following essential components:

1. Continuous Monitoring: To identify brand and traffic abuse in real time, such as trademark misuse or product counterfeiting.
2. Rapid Threat Resolution: Through administrative actions that fix issues before they significantly impact brand reputation and performance.
3. Focus on Protecting the Full Marketing Funnel: Shielding both customer acquisition and retention, ensuring that traffic generated by campaigns is directed to the correct channels.
4. Impact Analysis and Optimization: Continuously measuring the effect of shielding actions on customer acquisition cost (CAC), ROI, and brand reputation

Key Benefits

Shield Marketing delivers tangible results, including:

• Increased ROI: by eliminating practices that drive up campaign costs.
• Protection of perceived brand value: by preventing abuse from damaging reputation.
• Marketing savings: by avoiding waste from invalid clicks and fraud.
• Sustainable organic growth: by ensuring that traffic and conversions happen legitimately.

This concept applies to businesses of all sizes, but it is especially relevant for large corporations, e-commerce companies that rely on digital channels, and well-established brands in their segments.

Traffic Shielding

Digital traffic—especially from potential or loyal customers—is a valuable asset for any brand, but it is often diverted by competitors, unethical partners, and fraudulent practices.

Among the main challenges that Shield Marketing addresses are:

• Traffic diversion: competitors or partners use the brand name as a keyword in search campaigns to redirect clicks that should go to the official website.
• Traffic cannibalization: automated campaigns, such as P-MAX and DSA, can inflate the CPC of branded keywords.
• Attribution diversion: Black Hat Attribution tactics, arbitrage, and ads hijacking by affiliates and partners compromise the accurate attribution of campaign results.

These issues lead to increased media costs, loss of qualified traffic, and a dilution of marketing efforts.

Brand Shielding

Brand infringement is a serious problem in the digital environment. The misuse of brands in ads, marketplaces, and social media, as well as brand impersonation scams, compromises brand integrity and causes various damages.

Brand Infringement on Marketplaces and Social Media

• Use of Brand Terms and Images: third parties improperly use the brand’s visual and textual assets in their product or service listings;
• Counterfeit Products: marketplaces may list counterfeit products using the brand’s name and identity, harming the reputation and deceiving consumers;
• Unauthorized Products and Services: unauthorized sellers promote products or services that are not original or have no official connection to the brand.

Brand Infringement on Search Engines

• Unauthorized use of trademark in sponsored ads: external agents use the brand term without authorization in the ad title or description, violating the brand’s rights. This practice can confuse consumers and harm the brand’s perception by wrongly associating it with products or services that are not official.

Scams Using the Brand (Brand Impersonation)

• Creation of phishing domains: websites that impersonate the brand to deceive consumers;
• Fake profiles on social media: profiles created to trick users with false promotions or products;
• Ads with fake promotions: fraudulent ads that direct consumers to nonexistent offers.

These practices result in a range of problems for the brand, directly affecting public perception due to complaints from deceived consumers. This creates a reputation crisis that harms marketing campaign performance. With the brand’s reputation compromised, the perceived value is diluted, negatively impacting sales and performance campaign results.

The Problem That Shield Marketing Solves

One of the most harmful practices in the Search Ads environment is brand bidding, where competitors or unethical partners use brand keywords to divert qualified traffic. These keywords are usually the best-performing ones, accounting for more than 50% of conversions and often delivering the best CPA and ROI. When the brand loses this traffic to third parties, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) increases, and the return on investment (ROI) is directly affected, compromising the LTV/CAC ratio, which is essential for marketing campaign success.

Furthermore, abuses such as unauthorized use of brand terms in sponsored ads, counterfeit products—often found on marketplaces—on social media, and phishing sites that mimic the brand’s visual identity create consumer distrust. A customer deceived by digital scams begins to doubt the brand’s security and hesitates to make new purchases. This results not only in immediate sales losses but also in long-term damage to the brand’s reputation.

Although Shield Marketing is not primarily focused on combating credit card fraud, Visa’s study on fraud in Brazil provides important context. Brazil is the second country with the highest fraud rate in the world, at 14.24%, second only to China. This number reflects the vulnerability of the Brazilian digital environment, making it fertile ground for scammers and fraudsters. The study, which analyzed 2.7 billion transactions made throughout 2023, totaling US$ 381 billion, shows that although the success rate of fraud attempts is relatively low (only 2.44% of attempts resulted in actual losses), the large volume of fraud demonstrates how susceptible Brazil is to fraudulent activities.

This reality underscores the need for robust shielding against scams using the brand name, especially in a country where digital fraud is so prevalent. The absence of proactive measures to combat practices such as brand bidding, phishing, and counterfeiting can significantly compromise the performance of marketing campaigns and, consequently, consumer trust.

Relationship with Other Marketing Strategies

While traditional marketing focuses on generating leads, traffic, and conversions, Shield Marketing preserves the value created by campaigns over time by protecting the brand’s digital assets.

This strategy complements others such as growth, branding, performance, content, and influencer marketing. By protecting the brand against abuse and traffic diversion, Shield Marketing provides a solid foundation for sustainable growth and increased campaign efficiency.

For example, in growth marketing, the shielding strategy helps prevent CAC inflation caused by unfair practices like traffic diversion. In branding, it protects the integrity of the brand identity, allowing the team to focus on growth strategies without external interference.

In short, Shield Marketing fixes the "leaky bucket" problem in marketing, where effort is diluted and investment is lost due to abuses that compromise performance and consumer trust.

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The Pillars of Shield Marketing

Shield Marketing is supported by three main pillars:

1. Monitoring and Identification

The first step is constant monitoring of all the brand’s digital channels and assets. This includes:

• Monitoring keywords in paid search campaigns;
• Checking brand usage (images, logos, texts) on platforms such as Google, Amazon, Mercado Livre, Shopee, and social media;
• Identifying brand infringements in domains, ads, and fake profiles.

2. Problem Resolution

Once abuses are identified, Shield Marketing acts quickly to resolve the problem. This may involve administrative actions with platforms or legal proceedings, depending on the severity of the situation. The strategic resolution focuses on cases that can generate the greatest positive impact for the brand, such as cost savings and recovery of diverted traffic.

3. Impact Measurement

The final step is to measure the impact of shielding actions. This includes:

• Monitoring the reduction of CPC on branded keywords.
• Evaluating conversion performance in digital campaigns after abuse resolution.
• Measuring the impact on customer retention and the increase in lifetime value (LTV) after brand shielding.

Why the Term "Shielding"?

The term “shielding” was chosen because it goes beyond simple protection. It reflects the need for an impenetrable barrier that prevents any attempt to violate or abuse the brand. Protecting is not enough — it is necessary to shield the value the brand has built, ensuring that marketing efforts are not diluted by third-party actions.

The difference between shielding and protecting is fundamental to understanding the concept of Shield Marketing. While protecting the brand involves a reactive approach, usually handled by the legal department, which can result in longer resolution times due to the need for lawsuits or bureaucratic actions, shielding the brand is a proactive, results-driven strategy led by marketing professionals.

Although both actions are reactive in essence, brand shielding resolves threats much faster and at a lower cost, as it relies on administrative solutions. The speed of response is crucial to minimizing damage, ensuring fewer consumers are affected by the threats.

Protecting the Brand: Reactive, Legal, and Bureaucratic

• Protecting the brand generally involves reactive and defensive actions, often led by legal departments, and focuses on intellectual property and brand integrity issues. These actions, such as lawsuits or removal of illegal content, tend to be slower and more bureaucratic, meaning that problem resolution can take time, allowing damages to spread before being fully addressed.
• While necessary, brand protection measures often require significant resources and costs and do not directly impact marketing performance metrics.

Shielding the Brand: Proactive, Administrative, and Agile

• Shielding the brand, on the other hand, is a more agile and strategic approach led by marketing professionals. Instead of relying on lengthy legal processes, shielding operates through swift administrative actions focused on resolving issues before they escalate. This ensures a faster response time and fewer consumers are affected by threats.
• When shielding the brand, the focus is not only on eliminating the threat but also on preserving the brand’s performance and marketing campaigns, preventing harmful practices such as traffic diversion, brand impersonation scams, and trademark violations in marketplaces and social media from compromising financial results and consumer trust.

Results-Oriented Vision

• While brand protection is limited by bureaucracy and response time, shielding the brand puts marketing professionals in control to ensure fast and effective results. This includes reducing costs—both operational and customer acquisition cost (CAC)—and increasing return on investment (ROI). Additionally, shielding actively protects the brand’s reputation, a key factor in maintaining consumer trust and campaign performance.
• Shield Marketing transforms protection actions into a mechanism to improve campaign performance by responding swiftly and effectively to threats, ensuring that the brand’s value is preserved and maximized.

Expected Results

Companies with specialists in Shield Marketing on their teams can expect several benefits, such as increased ROI from digital campaigns, reduced marketing costs—allowing reinvestment in other stages of the acquisition funnel—and protection of the brand’s organic growth, which drives better results in organic search.

Additionally, shielding prevents fraud and scams that dilute the perceived value and harm the brand’s reputation.

A practical example of traffic shielding is Riachuelo, which, by implementing Shield Marketing, achieved an 81% reduction in CPC and doubled the CTR in its performance campaigns.

Similarly, Serasa managed to reduce the CPC of its campaigns by 85%, saving millions of reais by eliminating unfair competition practices and achieving a 39x ROI.

In the scope of brand shielding, Farm removed over 265 fake ads, increasing the share of brand term impressions on Google by 92%.

The company Pé de Algodão, in turn, identified and removed over R$10 million worth of counterfeit products from marketplaces and virtually eliminated complaints in its customer service center.

The telecommunications company Algar used shielding marketing strategies focused on SEO (search engine optimization) and increased organic traffic to its website by 33%, along with a 54% rise in conversions from organic sources.

Conclusion

Shielding Marketing is an essential pillar for any marketing strategy aiming to protect brand value, enhance campaign performance, and ensure the integrity of digital efforts. By shielding the brand against fraud, violations, and abuses, companies can focus on growth and expansion without fearing loss of value or reputation.

Moreover, Shielding Marketing has a positive impact across various areas of the company, complementing other marketing strategies such as branding, growth, and performance. It allows marketing professionals to concentrate on brand growth without worrying about interference from external agents that compromise results. Unlike simple legal protection, shielding is an agile, results-oriented approach that enables faster and less costly problem resolution.

In short, Shielding Marketing is not just a protection solution; it is an essential strategic tool for companies that want to preserve and maximize the value of their brand, their customers, and their digital assets in an increasingly competitive market vulnerable to abuses.