PPC Bidding by Affiliates: It’s about Controlling Your Brand
“Merchants’ policies that forbid their affiliates from bidding on their trademarks hurt the merchants’ brands.”
Wayne Porter and Jeff Molander shook their heads when I made this statement as we sat outside at a New York cafe last month. Before we finished our coffee, they were scratching their heads and asked me to write for ReveNews. What caught their attention? Why am I fighting conventional wisdom?
I don’t ever whine that merchants are hurting their affiliates. I simply wonder why merchants hurt their own brands. Merchants tell me that their companies have spent hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars to build their trademarks and my company should not be able to get a free ride on that. While that sounds logical, it is wrong. This brick-and-mortar logic does not exactly extend to the online world.
Advertising on a merchant’s trademarks is a privilege and not an affiliate’s right. Read that again. I am an affiliate who acknowledges that bidding on trademarks is a privilege that must be earned. At the same time, having affiliates bid on your trademarks can help you control your brand.
The two issues at the heart of the policies banning bidding are (i) control of the merchant’s brand and (ii) decreasing advertising costs. Unfortunately, these policies fail miserably at controlling the brand which means more will be spent on brand advertising in the future than the savings from the decreased affiliate commissions.
Before talking about whether or not merchants save money with these policies, we need to look at the issue of brand control in an old school way. To date, the discussion of trademark bidding has revolved around merchants saving commissions. This is an affiliate-focused view. Merchants need a merchant-focused view when analyzing this. The ban tends to come from the top when the CEO, president or general counsel decides that another company is abusing the merchant’s brand. Without fully analyzing the situation, a decision is made to cut off all use of the trademarks in advertising. This is not how it works in the brick-and-mortar world. Footlocker advertises Nike. BestBuy advertises Sony. Yet Footloker and BestBuy do not allow affiliates to use their trademarks in advertising. Instead of looking at it as the brand getting taken over, they need to evaluate whom they wish to partner with and give permission to those people in order to get control of their brand back.
By banning affiliates from bidding on trademarked terms, merchants are lying prostrate before Google and Yahoo. You are giving management of your brand to these two companies with whom you may have no relationship! I would want to control the results that come up when a user searches on my trademarks especially knowing that most users click predominantly on the first ten results.
If you banned affiliates from bidding on your trademarks, did you consider the unintended consequences?
This is the first in a series of posts on this topic. I will leave you with a few questions to consider:
1) How much of the search results page for your trademarks do you control?
2) How much of the search results page for your trademarks do you want to control?
3) What unintended consequences have you seen since you banned affiliates from bidding on your trademarks?
4) Have you ever written down what makes a good affiliate and what makes a bad affiliate?
5) Can good affiliates be a part of your SEO strategy?
Next: Unintended consequences in both paid and natural search -or- Now you’ve really lost control of your brand.
Coming Soon: Why it will be easier to monitor your program if you allow a few good affiliates to bid on your trademarked terms.
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