Ok, so Google will remove officially removed protection from advertisers bidding on brand-owners’ trademarks. However, you still will not be able to have these brand name terms visible in the AdText portion of the ad.

Are you prepared? Are your clients?

Are you going all out aggressively to bid against competitors trademarks?.

Are you going to start bidding against your own brand as protection?.

Perhaps a mixture?. Or are you going to wait and see what your competitors do?

So what does this mean for affiliate marketing? Well - I feel it’s pretty simple:

MERCHANTS SHOULD EMPLOY SEARCH AGENCIES TO PROTECT THEIR BRAND

So if affiliates bid on a brand and go via their own site, merchant’s can still stipulate that they don’t want that. But each merchant will have to do the calculations on their ROI between monitoring and responding to brand name “abuse”, hiring a search agency to conduct a review of the possibilities and implement a solution and just letting market forces dictate the way forward.

If there is going to be mass-scale brand name “abuse” then won’t this have an impact on the profitability of the channel for the merchant? Won’t this in-turn have the possible result of lowering commissions in certain circumstances?

But overall, I see the results as:

1. More affiliates randomly bidding on brands without checking what the merchant wants;
2. Merchants devoting more time to policing their brand;
3. More merchants removing their heads from their rear-ends and invite other affiliates to compete;
4. Google earning more;
5. Some affiliates spending a couple of months to work out how best to monetize this opportunity while forgetting to work on their generic campaigns;
6. More affiliates using PPC to bid on their content sites;
7. If “all hell breaks loose” then commissions may be reduced by big brand merchants;
8. The high life that agencies have (cough) been shattered - they’ll have to do some proper consultancy;
9. Egotistical, maniac, hypocritical, established brand-name bidders shit themselves as hoards of affiliates start to say “it’s ok with Google now remove your closed bidding groups or we’ll just saturate the SERPS with adverts for your competitors”.
10. People like me just plug away with SEO getting the brand traffic for free whilst the others fight it out;

For more information on Google’s Trademark Policy Change, please check out the official announcement.