The Power of Variable Data Printing: Protecting Luxury Brands and Combatting Counterfeiting

In today's digital age, counterfeiters have become increasingly sophisticated in their methods, with the potential to roll out billions of different versions of a product. By combining variable data printing with other security features, such as color tiles, barcodes, and covert packaging elements, luxury brands can protect themselves against counterfeiting.

HP is not the only company utilizing this technology, with a wide variety of partners working on similar solutions. According to estimates by the World Economic Forum's illicit economy council, which the author is part of, anybody who is a target for counterfeiting or illicit economy worldwide is estimated to be worth $1.4 trillion.

Luxury goods are particularly vulnerable to counterfeiting due to their high value and perceived authenticity. To combat this, manufacturers can use variable data printing on their packaging to create unique labels that tie directly into the back-end authentication process. This approach provides an additional layer of protection against counterfeiters who may try to replicate the packaging without access to the underlying product information.

This technology is also being used by other industries, including wine and pharmaceuticals. In the wine industry, for example, the label serves as both a differentiator and a way to legitimize the product. Similarly, in the pharmaceutical industry, where $75 billion of estimated counterfeiting occurs every year, manufacturers are using variable data printing to create unique labels that can help prevent counterfeiting.

Some may argue that this technology is simply about increasing profits through new revenue streams, but there are more significant concerns at play. When counterfeiters are able to replicate products, they may also be centralizing money into the hands of state-sponsored terrorists or other malicious actors. This creates a legitimate concern for governments and industries around the world.

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The Power of Steganography: Protecting Images in the Digital Age

In the digital age, images are increasingly vulnerable to tampering and manipulation. By using steganographic techniques, such as modifying an image without anyone noticing, individuals can hide information within seemingly innocuous visual content.

For this article, we have obtained both the original and modified versions of a steganographic image, which has undergone imperceptible changes. The difference is subtle, but it highlights the potential for hidden messages or data to be concealed within images. This technology has far-reaching implications for industries such as finance, healthcare, and entertainment.

As we move forward in this article, we will explore the intersection of steganography and variable data printing, and how these technologies can be used together to create robust security measures against counterfeiting. We'll delve into the world of luxury brands, wine producers, and pharmaceutical companies, and examine the ways in which they are utilizing these technologies to protect themselves against counterfeiters.

The Intersection of Variable Data Printing and Steganography

By combining variable data printing with steganographic techniques, individuals can create robust security measures that prevent counterfeiting. This approach involves using subtle changes to an image or label that go unnoticed by the human eye, but are detectable by specialized software or equipment.

For instance, in the case of the modified steganographic image provided earlier, it's clear that something has changed, but the nature of those changes is not immediately apparent. This highlights the importance of having a reference point for comparison, such as the original version of the image.

By using this technology, luxury brands and other industries can create products with unique labels or packaging that are difficult to replicate without access to the underlying product information. This approach serves as an additional layer of protection against counterfeiters, who may try to produce fake products by mimicking the packaging rather than accessing the actual product information.

The Importance of Partnerships in Combatting Counterfeiting

In the fight against counterfeiting, partnerships are crucial for effective collaboration and information-sharing between industry stakeholders. By working together, companies can share knowledge, best practices, and technologies to stay ahead of counterfeiters.

According to our research, there are numerous partners working on variable data printing solutions with luxury brands and other industries. These partnerships involve collaborations between major manufacturers, suppliers, and technology providers, all of whom recognize the importance of protecting their products against counterfeiting.

In addition to the economic benefits of combating counterfeiting, such as preventing financial losses and protecting brand reputation, there are also significant social implications at play. By centralizing money into the hands of state-sponsored terrorists or other malicious actors, counterfeiters may be inadvertently supporting nefarious activities that threaten global security and stability.

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For those interested in expanding their knowledge on topics such as counterfeiting, steganography, and luxury brands, Able.com offers an extensive library of audio books. With over 250,000 titles available for download or streaming, there's something for everyone.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support education and awareness, we invite you to explore the world of audio books with Able.com. Sign up now for a free trial and discover new perspectives on topics that matter most to you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enone of the areas that I work in is security printing which is using labels packaging and variable data Printing and so variable data printing is very important it takes a lot of computer science you if you look at a digital press like the HP indigo you'll see it has a 12pack of major processors on board the reason for that is so that it can provide a different set of data on every single label or package that goes out that's called variable data printing or VDP and VDP is very important because allows you then to have a unique ID or multiple IDs for each package or label that goes out I brought a couple of Marks here this one actually shows a small sheet of 16 different you'll wonder what's different in each of these I've got a different hidden Mark which is called a covert Mark or a digital water mark hidden behind these sort of solid tones in each of these places more importantly one that you can see are the overs that are actually visible and those are these 2D barcodes that are here along with the colors that are around those each of those allow you to have a barcode reader read the barcode and plug you to a different web page if needed the mark that's around that actually allows you then to legitimize it with a second stage the power from this comes from the fact that data has to stream out to these labels at real time as they're Printing and you say well how how much work can that be the Indigo actually prints things out at 812 pixels per inch you go why is it 82 12 well it's because it's 320 per CM so it's tied to the metric system but if you do a quick multiplication of that and you recognize that there's a different color for each of these pixels there's as many as 800 by 800 which is you can do the math is 640,000 pixels per square inch and I'm moving this along at let's say for example 30 m a minute that's a lot of data to be printing out we need to be able to program that so what we generally do is try to get as much bang for the buck as we can and only have the variable areas be as small as necessary so I've got a couple of other examples here that really illustrate the gamut of protection you can provide in this case I've got five different little photos Each of which could have a unique covert symbol associated with that one of the things that my colleagues have produced is halone steganography where we actually have hidden information that's tied into how we do our half toning those work very very well on spot colors and so that might be what I've shown here in the spot color area there's also digital watermark provid ERS that are out there and they will provide that in the image itself what I show in this label here is the ability to have really simple things that provide a lot of variability we call this crazy text and what it actually has is a wide variety of features here it's a very very difficult to see but there's a light gray turn arrow here there's this sort of red warning sign and there's this black square if I now come down to here I have a red square a black smiley face and a cyan Amper sand let's suppose that I just have 30 or 40 different of those characters a smiley face an Amper sand a star Etc and I have them in 10 different colors you can see very quickly wait wait I've got 40 time 10 I have 400 different characters that I can provide in any space I only need three or four of those to have billions of possibilities in in terms of what I've put in for the crazy text so if you add that with what I've done with the color tiles what I've done with the barcode and then what I've done with some of the other more covert features that are on the packaging I very quickly have the ability to roll out more different packages than there are corks in the universe I'm assuming that HP aren't the only people doing this sort of thing what the manufacturers might be doing this sort of thing no no so we actually have a wide variety of partners that work on this anybody who is a target for counterfeiting or for illicit economy illicit economy worldwide is $1.4 trillion is the estimate by the world economic forum's illicit um economy coun which I'm part of anybody who is a target for counterfeits is interested in being able to provide protection through variable data printing on their packaging good targets for that are anybody who has a luxury good where they're actually charging you more because you trust the brand a luxury good provider then could have for example a simple label there that ties them into the back end a luxury good manufacturer also has some advantages because their supply chain may be very limited in other words they they only have a few stores in in the world that actually provide their products think of like Gucci or somebody like that and so they can actually directly because the the uh the amount of profit that they make per good is high enough for them to individually label each of those they might want a very strong label out there that allows them to authenticate it somebody else who wants to do that is somebody who's differentiating within a brand and that might be for example somebody who is a wine provider you know so if you've got somebody at a winery most people actually don't know much about wine and they pick their wine off of the label and so the label is both a differentiator and then a way for them to actually legitimize the wine one one at another you you'd be surprised how much counterfeiting is actually done in wine pharmaceutical providers are one $75 billion of estimated counterfeiting in Pharmaceuticals every year and they're okay they want to spend a lot on the label because it's a very high margin item providing a very valuable service for their in customers you could actually say that they're responsible if they don't do this because they do have such a high margin and they are a good Target for counterfeits because of the small size of production for those pling devil's advocate here are you are you sure this isn't just all about just getting more money in I mean what what's the problem if um if somebody kind of you know puts something different in a box that looks a bit the same yeah absolutely so aside from the primary um disruption of the brand which might be something that HP would be more concerned about you have then products which are providing cancer protection which are providing malarial protection which are doing some kind of a Health Care Service you could also have parts that are going on to airplanes or cars you could also have people who aren't just interested in making money off of the counterfeiting which is the usual case most people who are doing the counterfeiting are trying to be in this for long term they pay their Engineers very well because they don't have to do marketing or sales or any brand uh development but what also happens is this channels money into the hands of few and if those few happen to be state sponsored terrorists you've got yourself a legitimate concern that money is being centralized into the hands of people who want to use that money for something much more dangerous than just simply making money off of your brand we'd like to say a big thank you to able.com for supporting the computer file Channel they're the leading provider of audio books online they've got over 250,000 titles to choose from so for your 30-day free trial go over to audible.com computer file now I'd like to recommend a book by Richard El Sanders today it's called The Phoenix conspiracy and it's one of a series of books I got hooked on a couple years back I'm up to about book six now Richard's imagined an amazing Universe of humans and aliens and a Galactic Empire with kings and queens and all sorts of really interesting ideas so check out the Phoenix conspiracy sign up to your 30-day free trial at audible.com computer file thanks once again to Audible for supporting the computer file Channel I can tell that something's changed because I've got the original and the new steganographic image with me but if I just sent out an image of my dog and I never sent out the original that the camera took no one's going to know that it's been imperceptibly changed because they haven't got a referenceone of the areas that I work in is security printing which is using labels packaging and variable data Printing and so variable data printing is very important it takes a lot of computer science you if you look at a digital press like the HP indigo you'll see it has a 12pack of major processors on board the reason for that is so that it can provide a different set of data on every single label or package that goes out that's called variable data printing or VDP and VDP is very important because allows you then to have a unique ID or multiple IDs for each package or label that goes out I brought a couple of Marks here this one actually shows a small sheet of 16 different you'll wonder what's different in each of these I've got a different hidden Mark which is called a covert Mark or a digital water mark hidden behind these sort of solid tones in each of these places more importantly one that you can see are the overs that are actually visible and those are these 2D barcodes that are here along with the colors that are around those each of those allow you to have a barcode reader read the barcode and plug you to a different web page if needed the mark that's around that actually allows you then to legitimize it with a second stage the power from this comes from the fact that data has to stream out to these labels at real time as they're Printing and you say well how how much work can that be the Indigo actually prints things out at 812 pixels per inch you go why is it 82 12 well it's because it's 320 per CM so it's tied to the metric system but if you do a quick multiplication of that and you recognize that there's a different color for each of these pixels there's as many as 800 by 800 which is you can do the math is 640,000 pixels per square inch and I'm moving this along at let's say for example 30 m a minute that's a lot of data to be printing out we need to be able to program that so what we generally do is try to get as much bang for the buck as we can and only have the variable areas be as small as necessary so I've got a couple of other examples here that really illustrate the gamut of protection you can provide in this case I've got five different little photos Each of which could have a unique covert symbol associated with that one of the things that my colleagues have produced is halone steganography where we actually have hidden information that's tied into how we do our half toning those work very very well on spot colors and so that might be what I've shown here in the spot color area there's also digital watermark provid ERS that are out there and they will provide that in the image itself what I show in this label here is the ability to have really simple things that provide a lot of variability we call this crazy text and what it actually has is a wide variety of features here it's a very very difficult to see but there's a light gray turn arrow here there's this sort of red warning sign and there's this black square if I now come down to here I have a red square a black smiley face and a cyan Amper sand let's suppose that I just have 30 or 40 different of those characters a smiley face an Amper sand a star Etc and I have them in 10 different colors you can see very quickly wait wait I've got 40 time 10 I have 400 different characters that I can provide in any space I only need three or four of those to have billions of possibilities in in terms of what I've put in for the crazy text so if you add that with what I've done with the color tiles what I've done with the barcode and then what I've done with some of the other more covert features that are on the packaging I very quickly have the ability to roll out more different packages than there are corks in the universe I'm assuming that HP aren't the only people doing this sort of thing what the manufacturers might be doing this sort of thing no no so we actually have a wide variety of partners that work on this anybody who is a target for counterfeiting or for illicit economy illicit economy worldwide is $1.4 trillion is the estimate by the world economic forum's illicit um economy coun which I'm part of anybody who is a target for counterfeits is interested in being able to provide protection through variable data printing on their packaging good targets for that are anybody who has a luxury good where they're actually charging you more because you trust the brand a luxury good provider then could have for example a simple label there that ties them into the back end a luxury good manufacturer also has some advantages because their supply chain may be very limited in other words they they only have a few stores in in the world that actually provide their products think of like Gucci or somebody like that and so they can actually directly because the the uh the amount of profit that they make per good is high enough for them to individually label each of those they might want a very strong label out there that allows them to authenticate it somebody else who wants to do that is somebody who's differentiating within a brand and that might be for example somebody who is a wine provider you know so if you've got somebody at a winery most people actually don't know much about wine and they pick their wine off of the label and so the label is both a differentiator and then a way for them to actually legitimize the wine one one at another you you'd be surprised how much counterfeiting is actually done in wine pharmaceutical providers are one $75 billion of estimated counterfeiting in Pharmaceuticals every year and they're okay they want to spend a lot on the label because it's a very high margin item providing a very valuable service for their in customers you could actually say that they're responsible if they don't do this because they do have such a high margin and they are a good Target for counterfeits because of the small size of production for those pling devil's advocate here are you are you sure this isn't just all about just getting more money in I mean what what's the problem if um if somebody kind of you know puts something different in a box that looks a bit the same yeah absolutely so aside from the primary um disruption of the brand which might be something that HP would be more concerned about you have then products which are providing cancer protection which are providing malarial protection which are doing some kind of a Health Care Service you could also have parts that are going on to airplanes or cars you could also have people who aren't just interested in making money off of the counterfeiting which is the usual case most people who are doing the counterfeiting are trying to be in this for long term they pay their Engineers very well because they don't have to do marketing or sales or any brand uh development but what also happens is this channels money into the hands of few and if those few happen to be state sponsored terrorists you've got yourself a legitimate concern that money is being centralized into the hands of people who want to use that money for something much more dangerous than just simply making money off of your brand we'd like to say a big thank you to able.com for supporting the computer file Channel they're the leading provider of audio books online they've got over 250,000 titles to choose from so for your 30-day free trial go over to audible.com computer file now I'd like to recommend a book by Richard El Sanders today it's called The Phoenix conspiracy and it's one of a series of books I got hooked on a couple years back I'm up to about book six now Richard's imagined an amazing Universe of humans and aliens and a Galactic Empire with kings and queens and all sorts of really interesting ideas so check out the Phoenix conspiracy sign up to your 30-day free trial at audible.com computer file thanks once again to Audible for supporting the computer file Channel I can tell that something's changed because I've got the original and the new steganographic image with me but if I just sent out an image of my dog and I never sent out the original that the camera took no one's going to know that it's been imperceptibly changed because they haven't got a reference\n"