Sometimes the stars align and topics you’re already thinking about suddenly become major news items. Last week’s news cycle was was all about affiliate marketing, starting with a Wall Street Journal article about how style bloggers monetize their blogs, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and culminating in Pinterest’s announcement that it would be banning affiliate links from its site.

With 2015 now well underway (can you believe it’s February?!) and Affiliate Summit West behind us (though we’re already looking forward to our next chance to meet up with our customers in person!), BrandVerity’s team is looking towards what’s next for this blog space. Last year we did several exciting things, including deeper dives into how major events like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, and the NFL Season impact paid search, how best to navigate the delicate balance of Reseller trademark bidding, and how to work with Lead Generation Publishers in a smart and thoughtful manner. This year we want to do even more.

Affiliate Summit West 2015 was, by all accounts, a great event. The office has been buzzing for the last week as the ten (!) people who were at the conference have shared stories, contacts, and favorite moments.

My intrepid partner in [educating the world about trademark] crime, Sam Engel, presented at Affiliate Summit West yesterday morning on a panel called “Affiliate Legal Issues: Three Immediate Action Items.” Sharing the stage with him were Gary Kibel, a partner at Davis & Gilbert, LLP, and Gerri-Lyn Becker, President of The California Wine Club. The panel was moderated by Carolyn Kmet, CMO at All Inclusive Marketing.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse released a survey yesterday revealing that teenagers now use e-cigarettes at substantially higher rates than traditional cigarettes. The results of the annual, federal survey was written up in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Tripp Mickle, an expert on drugs and alcohol for the WSJ, writes:

Right before Thanksgiving, we ran a quick post outlining how to minimize the non-compliant paid search tactics that often crop up around Black Friday. We also said in that post that we’d update with any trends we noticed in the days leading up to and on Black Friday. This is that post! (Aren’t you excited?)

We've recently been finding some ads appearing on Yahoo and Bing without a Display URL. We first noticed this on Yahoo, where the ads were simply composed of a headline and description text (without any space for a Display URL to appear). In some more recent monitoring, the examples we've found on Bing have always included a lone dot in the Display URL field. In the Bing example on the right, you can see this dot followed a gap where the Display URL would normally be.

If this blog series could be summed up in a single phrase, it would probably be “what you don’t know can definitely hurt you.” (Then again, that might be the theme of all BrandVerity blog posts). But, even if you know what your partners and publishers are doing, that doesn’t always fully fix the problem. This blog post will look at an example we found where a brand has managed to reap the benefits of working with lead gen partners—including increased coverage on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and likely an increase in marketing efficiency—while maintaining nearly total control over brand image.

If you’ve been following our lead gen series, you’ll know that we’ve already discussed the basic outline of lead generation sites and the problems that arise when those sites bid on your terms. This week we’re going to discuss what happens when a lead gen site takes brand bidding a step further by masquerading as a particular company.