Pivotal Veracity Unveils Critical Brand Monitoring and Protection Tool

Imperative for Corporations to Ensure Brand Credibility in Online Marketing Activities

SARASOTA, Fla.-October 4, 2004--Pivotal Veracity, LLC, an independent email delivery audit and optimization company, today introduced eBrand Monitor, a new tool to help organizations easily and comprehensively monitor their greatest assets, protect their reputation and safeguard the viability of their email communications. eBrand Monitor tracks a company’s domains, IP addresses, URLs and brand names to ensure they are reinforcing the company’s positive image and are not being used by unauthorized parties or in ways that will negatively impact the company’s ability to communicate effectively and credibly with their online customers.

Today, communication between an organization and its online customers has been significantly impacted and improved by the use of email. Unfortunately, while companies and their customers have become increasingly reliant on email, spam, scams and outright fraud are threatening its continued use as a credible and viable means of communication. Today, an estimated 70% of all email traffic in the U.S. is considered spam_up 10% since the passing of the CAN-SPAM act. However, spam is not the only problem now haunting the "killer app." In May 2004, the Anti-Phishing Working Group estimated that 1,100 new email scams were launched, and the Gartner Group estimates that a total of 57 million adults in the U.S. had received a phishing email by the end of May.

"eBrand Monitor offers an effective, easy and holistic way for our clients to monitor their brand and quickly and decisively resolve potential problems before they impact the delivery or credibility of their customer communications," said David Fowler, Director of Deliverability and ISP Relations for @Once, a leading email marketing solutions provider whose clients include Nintendo, Home Shopping Network, Warner Bros. and others. "Companies that consider brand value an asset will no doubt be encouraged to finally see a solution that allows them to easily manage the long-term viability of this most important of assets."

"Delivery optimization typically focuses on sound privacy policies, permission-driven mailing practices, secure infrastructures and email content," said Deirdre Baird, president of Pivotal Veracity. "While still essential to delivery, there are, unfortunately, many factors outside a client’s individual practices that now directly impact their ability to successfully communicate with their customers. With the growing false-positive problem, companies worry about whether their critical emails will reach their customers’ inboxes. Today, they must also worry about whether they will be perceived as credible once they arrive."

eBrand Monitor Features and Benefits

The eBrand Monitor solution incorporates the following five critical monitors, each of which may be activated as needed:

Abuse Board Monitor – Tracks who, where, when, and why a company’s name or products are being spoken about on the top abuse boards. Allows a company to gain important and direct insight into customer perceptions, identify unauthorized postings by employees, and pinpoint how phishers and other disreputable companies may be using the company’s brand in illegal ways. Enables a company to improve their marketing communications as well as identify and mitigate potential problems before they damage the company’s brand and deliverability.

Blacklist Monitor – Tracks the IP addresses a company uses for deploying email against the major blacklists used by ISPs and corporations to identify and block unwanted mail. It identifies problems with server configurations and system vulnerabilities that enable spammers to exploit/hijack the deployment systems, as well as whether the IP has been designated as a source of spam, viruses or phishing emails. Additionally, it enables a company to monitor all its IPs – including internal as well as 3rd-party deployment systems. This is an increasingly crucial requirement given that most companies use IPs from which many types of mailings occur (e.g. marketing, customer service, salespeople) and deploy email from IPs or networks also used by other companies (as is often the case with external email deployment vendors and acquisition mailings).

News Monitor – Tracks when, how often and where a company’s or competitor’s name or products are mentioned in online articles. Allows a company to gauge the effectiveness and impact of public relations efforts and tie mentions to inbound leads, verify there are no unauthorized uses of its trademarked brands, and track trends between them, their competitors and their industry.

Site Link Monitor – Tracks how many other sites on the Internet are linking to a company’s Web site/s. Generally, a company wants other companies to promote its Web site, as it results in leads to the Web site and may increase its ranking on leading search engines. Site Link Monitor also allows a company to guard against potential negative influences on its brand such as: Sites that do not support positioning (e.g., porn sites, discounters) and phishers (phishers often create Web sites that include links to the Web site they are phishing).

URL Monitor – ISPs and enterprises are increasingly turning to URL blocklists as an important spam and fraud filter as they are not reliant on the sender’s identity (which can be faked), but rather use the URLs in the body of the emails to determine whether the email is spam or fraudulent. The URL Monitor examines and monitors the domains and IPs a company uses in its emails to ensure they are not associated with spam, thereby preventing the delivery of customer communications, or being utilized by phishers to perpetuate fraud.

Pricing and Availability

eBrand Monitor is currently available through Pivotal Veracity and Pivotal Veracity partners as both a stand-alone solution and as a component of Pivotal Veracity’s delivery optimization suite. As a hosted, Web-based solution, it requires no installation or integration. eBrand Monitor is provided on an annual or monthly subscription basis with basic packages beginning at $500/month.

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