The launch of Google’s new artificial intelligence model ‘Gemini’ on 6 December was one of the most significant recent brand launches, and was followed almost immediately by a spike in associated brand infringements. The findings highlight the importance of a proactive programme of brand monitoring, as part of a wider brand protection (BP) initiative, but monitoring can be difficult in instances where – as in this case – the brand name is a generic term which is frequently used in unrelated contexts (specifically astrology in this instance). 

In our latest study, we show how the application of ‘positive’ (relevance) and ‘negative’ (exclusion, or non-relevance) keywords used together can achieve an effective separation between relevant and non-relevant results, particularly when also combined with the utilisation of focused search keywords in the brand monitoring configuration.

These ideas are key to the implementation of an efficient BP programme, to avoid expensive spends on time required to manually review and filter out false positives – and also minimise the chances of significant findings being overlooked. It is also worth noting, however, that part of a holistic BP initiative should involve the review of ‘borderline’ results (which are neither obviously explicitly relevant nor non-relevant), to identify significant third-party brand uses. Accordingly, it is essential to bear this point in mind when selecting the search terms to be used and the thresholds to be set for the relevance cut-offs.

You can read the full report here.