MSN Brand Terms - the new Google?

[fionam]

One of my lovely fellow marketeers here at Equator just brought something to my attention which could have an impact on the affiliate industry.

Basically, MSN are updating their trademark policy and as a result they "will no longer attempt to mediate affiliate compliance by creating lists of trademark-owner approved advertisers who can bid on trademarked keywords" - basically moving to a similar stance as Google...

You can read the full statement from MSN here: adCenter Blog: Update to management of the Microsoft adCenter trademark policy

What are everyone's thoughts on this? Is MSN a big enough player in search engine terms for this to have a big impact? Or is their share too low for this to have any significant effect on an affiliate's PPC campaign? And when this does come into play will Yahoo! follow suit?

[gadget]

They may of course be covering their backs to ensure no legal proceedings are started with regard to any perceived trademark infringements!

[gopher]

Great move, now they only need to stop randomly disapproving keywords, and they might be worth playing around with again. Right now I don't even bother with them, as over time they remove 50-75% of my non-tm terms (worse than YSM ..) and I stopped playing the game of re-adding them a long time ago ...

You can't beat MSN's conversion rates though

[mattb811]

Hi Fiona,

This reads to me as though MSN are moving away from the Google standpoint and more towards Yahoo! in that they are pushing more back to the networks to police trademark issues.

Microsoft adCenter will no longer attempt to mediate affiliate compliance by creating lists of trademark-owner approved advertisers who can bid on trademarked keywords

Does this not mean that Microsoft will allow any affiliate who is bidding on trademarked terms relevant to the goods and services that they promote to appear there? Then it will be up to networks and search agencies to monitor and police. It will not be the case like Google where a designated list have exemption on brand terms..

Am I reading this completely wrongly?

Matt

[Qui Gon Jinn]

It might confuse some network employees, merchants & agencies who don't understand broadmatch on generic words or hybrid phrases, with all kinds of cease & desist or mistakenly emails going to & fro. And some taking the foolish route of trying to force negative keywords on all affiliate paid search activity no matter what they do. I think they have had their work made easier in the past with Google's Assistance, now some parties may actually have to do some work after having it done for them.

It will certainly make it more competitive with non affiliated competitors occupying the space and perhaps could make merchants / agencies rethink & open eyes about affiliates occupying the space as against non affiliated competitors by adjusting commission levels if it's perceived a low hanging fruit. Once again brand bidding should maybe perceived a litmus test on the conversion rate & EPC of a merchant, many are poor at this which doesn't inspire confidence. I see more competitor merchants bidding on competitor brands than I do affiliates.

As mentioned in another thread, what's the difference between seo & paid search apart from immediacy. Each has elements of cost. Each can be controlled by the affiliate. Difference is maybe one to several ads on paid search & hundreds maybe thousands of references on seo. Yet many are so anal about paid search.

Perhaps merchants / agencies should focus more on delivering content units, decent reviews, decent product feeds, solus emails, more "hybrid commission structures", white labels & top selling products ( not surplus stock they are trying to shift) than reams of legal jargon in their T&C's. An affiliate doesn't have to be signed up to a merchants affiliate program to make money from that merchant. In a lot, maybe most, instances an affiliate could probably earn more by not being part of the program via arbitrage or feeds from price comparison companies.

Curious to know a networks stand point, if it would make much more additional work for them & whether the onus should be on them initially anyhow.

What's interesting though is how some parties automatically assume it's affiliates who are not compliant or it's the affiliate industry at risk, when yellow bellied merchants & agencies won't say boo to ask.com or ebay uk or competitor merchants.

Unless affiliates defend themselves, soon seo restrictions will be accepted as the norm and any reference to a merchant will have to be an image or javascript, that's how it's happening down petty lane. Soon merchants will restrict any form of paid search activity on generic terms going to an affiliates own site, oh hang on isn't that already happening. Slowly stiffer T&C's are creeping in without too much collective objection, that some have been mistakenly passed by networks in order to secure a client.

Some networks are maybe looking more towards strategic relationships with potential affiliates away from paid search, not your average affiliate but more the larger media portals, though closed bidding groups will still be their bread & butter for the short term at least.

On the whole it might be a good thing, why should the paid search engine police the brands? Though I feel there might be compelling reasons why they should. Then again why should networks, unless it's part of the service they offer & they act as the buffer.

randomly disapproving keywords

Very True .. atm MSN does convert better, and once advertisers realise, then they might improve their market share.

My intreptation also seems to be that it mainly won't administer closed groups, ie where a few affiliate / resellers can appear for a brand thus their ads will appear & others won't, if the landing page for the ad is relevant, then nowt may happen permission or not.

[lethal0r]

yes, this is moving away from googles stance.

[fionam]

Matt got me thinking even further about this scenario and you could certainly read it the way he pointed out - I agree that it does appear to be the stand point that MSN are taking in terms of policing, still leaving it up to the agency/network to monitor, just like Yahoo!

However in terms of trademarking this appeared to be a new move for MSN, similar to Google in that sense. The only SE that offered trademarking was Google - by MSN apparently introducing this I thought that they were moving into stricter conditions of taking up paid search space.

MSN and Yahoo! have given networks and agencies the difficult task of monitoring 'banned' terms. With this trademarking option being made available to merchants, MSN made it appear easier for this process to be done, as in theory affiliates would not be able to bid on trademarked terms.

I use the terms 'apparently' and 'in theory' because after investigating further with Microsoft, their new trademarking policy can only be put into place once a term has been agreed through the Patents Office - not the same as Google at all. In addition to this, once it has been enforced Microsoft will allow any affiliate who is bidding on trademarked terms relevant to the goods and services that that they promote to bid on keywords – providing that they are relevant and they have the required content to bid on that keyword. It will be up to the advertisers themselves to police affiliates’ usage of the trademark.

So nothing has changed really

[Deagle]

Atlas (owned by Microsoft) actually seem to think brand term bidding is largely wasteful anyway
Are Search Ads a Waste of Money?