On 7 June 2026, I travelled up to Edinburgh to begin my new role as Director of Brand Protection at SnapDragon.
I’m very excited to be joining SnapDragon – not least due to the head office location being in beautiful Edinburgh – but also because as a dynamic, fast-growing company with teams of accomplished experts, they adopt an agile approach to building and evolving their technology, coupled with an excellent philosophy to customer service by operating with integrity and transparency.
I come to the organisation with a number of key areas to my remit. My career in brand protection began at Envisional – a Cambridge-based start-up providing one of the earliest generations of online brand monitoring services – in 2004, and continued through company acquisitions by NetNames (2007) and CSC (2016), working in their Digital Brand Services divisions. Through this time, I developed my expertise in a range of areas of brand protection, with a particular focus on monitoring tools, technologies and algorithms, and data analysis. I also led the team of brand protection analysts for the period between 2006 and 2019, before moving into consultancy-focused roles. Between 2023 and 2026 I worked at Stobbs, a legal services provider and IP and brand advisory consultancy, helping them to build out their brand monitoring capabilities following their acquisition of technology provider. This also gave me a hands-on experience in a variety of types of enforcement work.
My primary focus areas at SnapDragon will be: the provision of leadership and guidance to the Brand Protection team, with particular consideration of service quality, value and efficiency; support for client relationships and for the Pre-Sales and Marketing teams; delivery of thought leadership; and providing a point of liaison between the Brand Protection and Technology teams, as we look to build out the next generation of evolutions to our brand protection technology.
“In my ‘Brand Protection Notebook’ blog series, I’ll be aiming to provide an overview of projects, tasks, events and insights associated with my role in leading the Brand Protection team here at SnapDragon”
Brand Protection Notebook – Part 1: Exploring the portal
One of my first tasks at SnapDragon was gaining an understanding of our brand protection platform. It provides a single technology environment in which both analysts and clients can review data, manage workflows, and extract insights from the data. My information has been drawn from discussions with the Operations, Sales and Technology teams, to gain an overview of how the system is used internally and by customers, and how it functions on a technical level.
The front page of the portal presents a dashboard of the data relating to the particular client in question, showing the numbers of results by monitored channel (marketplaces, social media, website content, domains, etc.), and segmented by their respective statuses in the enforcement workflow (i.e. ‘awaiting approval’ of next steps by the client, ‘awaiting enforcement’ by SnapDragon, ‘submitted’ and ‘successfully removed’. The datasets are also visualised graphically, showing overviews of timelines of activity, compliance rates, top infringing sellers, platforms and countries, and breakdowns by infringement type.
By clicking on any of the relevant categories, it is then possible to drill down into a detailed view of the data, in which analysts and clients are able to review detailed characteristics of each result, and assign tags, statuses, notes, next steps, and so on. This section of the portal also contains a variety of options for sorting and filtering the data. The summary view of the data is the key area where clients can review results and, either individually or in bulk, mark them up with statuses to provide instructions on the next steps (approve for enforcement, take no action, or mark as unenforceable).
Each individual result is represented by a single summary ‘tile’, showing key pieces of information such as; (for marketplace results, as a specific example), product images, enforcement status, listing title, platform, seller name, price (with conversion into local currency), associated result attributes (such as categorisations of infringement type), custom tags (typically used to classify by product type or characteristics), AI match score, and so on.
An (anonymised) example of a result ‘tile’ in the brand protection portal.
The tile also provides an option to click through to a more detailed ‘listing details’ view, containing additional information such as whether the result appears within a system ‘collection’ (used to aggregate together results into associated groups), the values of the individual AI analysis component scores, timelines of activity history, and a repository for adding notes to the result.
In future editions of Brand Protection Notebook, I’ll be diving deeper into various pieces of functionality within our brand protection system and exploring plans for new features and processes.
David Barnett
SnapDragon | Director of Brand Protection
