NameProtect on Monday introduced a low-cost service designed to help companies protect their brand on the Web.

Called the Brand Aware Report and available now, the service takes a one-time snapshot of how a company's brand is being used on the Web. The service is targeted at companies that don't already have a brand-management strategy in place and want to quickly discover any abuses lurking online, or for those who want to gauge how effective their existing strategy is, says Malia Horine, general manager of digital brand management services with NameProtect.

The service, based on the technology and analysis methods used in NameProtect's higher-end offerings, looks for online abuses such as trademark infringement, domain name misuse, traffic diversion, brand disparagement, and false endorsements, says Horine.

At Chicago law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, partner Carol Anne Been has used the Brand Aware Report to help a client seek out unauthorized brand use.

"There were two benefits to the report; it showed us uses [of the brand] that show up on a Web site ... in a wide variety of ways, some the client was aware of and others that were quiet surprising," says Been about her client, which has a famous brand both in the United States and overseas. "The other part was the domain name side" to find instances of cyber-squatting, where a Web site uses another company's mark in a domain name in bad faith, she says.

The law firm had been providing brand discovery services to its clients previous to using the Brand Aware Report by collecting information from a variety of sources, says Been, but this service is a "thorough and inexpensive tool" for automating that process.

The Brand Aware Report is priced at US$1,000.

Other services offered by NameProtect -- which competes with companies including Cyveillance and MarkMonitor -- include trademark screening and research, to help companies establishing a trademark examine and vet naming possibilities; brand and trademark watching, ongoing services that search for others' use of a brand; and digital brand optimization.