Stop funding pirates!

In this article, we will show you how your marketing spending can indirectly encourage the piracy of your products. Let's first review some of the desired effects and mechanisms of marketing, to understand how pirates can benefit from them.

Awareness rates

The most important indicator in the field is the unaided awareness rate, which is the percentage of people who will name your brand when asked “which brands in the sector do you know?”. An increase in this awareness rate is a useful indicator of the effectiveness of advertising spending.

The differences in aided awareness rates – where consumers pick out your brand from a list – before and after the spending generally confirm the results of the unaided awareness rates.

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Increased product desirability: positive effects, perverse effects

Thanks to this higher awareness rate, your product now becomes desirable. In theory, this should increase sales – which is the case at first.

But your product, now more attractive and better known, is also much more likely to be pirated – since there is now a recognized market for your work, pirates will take an interest in it.

A diversion of advertising spending?

Ad for a legal video game used on a pirate site

This report by the Digital Citizens group shows that, thanks to advertising and subscriptions, the revenues of the largest piracy platform operators are estimated at $2.34 billion a year. According to the report's authors, as with any illegal market, these figures are probably greatly underestimated.

The report also sheds light on another, much less well-known phenomenon: ad diversion.

Brands first send a flow of money to legitimate sites; ads are placed by specialized firms on sites targeted by the client. The ads found on these legal sites are then picked up by pirate sites and apps, but this time, the link no longer redirects to a legal version of your product, but to an illegal version, a “clickbait” link or even malware.

Paying to damage your image

Image is precisely what marketing spending aims at.

Yet the consumer experience is greatly diminished by the presence of your product on pirate sites; indeed, no quality control exists over pirated content. If consumers mainly see your product in its illegal version, they will form a false picture of the quality its creators intended; a flood of negative reviews online may result. You will then have paid to promote a poorly perceived product, and if you leave your products on the various pirate sites and apps without reacting, the money you invested in promotion will end up paying for negative reviews of a product whose quality does not reflect reality.

Is there no such thing as bad publicity?

Some argue that all publicity is good publicity, and that if people are talking about your film or your album, sales will go up. For others, every download is a sale you could have made.

The truth, as is often the case, probably lies somewhere in between – some pirates are clearly potential customers lost, and those are the ones you should focus your attention on.

This 2021 Australian ORIMA report confirms, for example, the figures published in 2016: 40% of identified pirates would buy the content they pirate if they could not find illicit content easily and quickly.

Anatomy of a pirate

So instead of seeing only the danger of piracy, it may be worthwhile to use part of this marketing spending to understand and profile this consumer segment, who are often culture enthusiasts with high incomes.

The ORIMA report cited above shows that, quite counter-intuitively, the segment of the population that pirates the most is made up of people who earn more than AUD 80k a year. 42% of these consumers pirate regularly – so it seems hard to think that price is a factor in this piracy.

Taking an interest in pirate sites and placing ads there to directly target the population segments you have identified could be a creative way to increase your revenue.

Of course, these measures must be accompanied by the conventional recommendations: monitoring and removal of illicit links and search results, so that the pirated version of your product is harder to find.

Combining these actions – removing illicit content and proactively looking for new customers on pirate sites – will let you take back control of your marketing spending.

If you need a company specialized in the field, don't hesitate to contact us; we are the Canadian leader in the intellectual property protection market.

We will put our teams' expertise and our specialized tools at your disposal to offer the best possible protection for your products.

Join us on June 1 for our two-part summer article: a love story between music and video games.