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.

This Friday officially kicks off the holiday shopping season (though if the emails I’ve been getting this week and this TechCrunch article are any indication, it’s already started). While we at BrandVerity look forward to the advent of holiday decorations, peppermint mochas, and really great deals just as much as everyone else, we also know that Black Friday can see a major uptick in the amount of brand bidding and trademark infringement appearing in paid search.

Picking up where we left off last week, when we discussed the path a consumer may take from Googling your name to clicking on a lead generation site's ad and ultimately landing on your competitor’s website, this week’s Lead Generation Question revolves around another method that lead gen sites use to drive customers: pay-per-call.

Last week we started our Lead Gen Series with a post outlining the basic structure of lead generation sites and some of the potential issues in that model. This week we move on to a more specific issue: brand bidding by lead gen sites. At BrandVerity we see a lot of lead gen sites bidding on companies’ brand terms. Interestingly, despite bidding on brand terms and often using those same brand terms in their ad copy, these lead generation sites don’t necessarily promote those same brands on their landing pages. This practice should raise some very serious concerns for companies that partner with lead gen sites.