Google made an announcement recently that they will be changing their policy with regards to trademarked keywords bidding. Beginning 4th June 2009, Google will no longer monitor or restrict previously trademarked keywords for ads served to users in South Africa.

Up until now trademark owners could enjoy a monopoly on trademark terms in South Africa by asking Google not to let any other party target its trademarks as keywords. The new bidding policy will impact the costs and strategies of advertising a trademarked brand through Google's AdWords program. 

For some brands this may result in significant increases in costs. What this effectively means, is on previously trademarked brand keyword terms, there will now be an equal opportunity for all advertisers to bid on these terms. Brands, thereby, no longer have exclusivity on trademarked terms on Google.

Acceleration Media has developed an approach to counter these affects. To read more on this approach, download Acceleration Media’s strategy in combating these changes below. 

Acceleration_Media_Google_TradeMark_Policy_Changes_May 2009.pdf (264.52 kb)

Here's an example of a website banner that interacts one to one with the user - http://www.dallassthlm.com/playground/playground.html. This banner, when displayed determines your location via IP address, matches this to your local weather information and recommends personally what type of clothing you should be wearing, jacket or no jacket.

Now this kind of functionality could be very useful to companies within the travel & tourism sector in attracting traffic through engagement. We think that if it’s possible to do this with weather, why can’t we do this with Soccer too. Imagine if you could attract potential Soccer visitors by displaying your flights, hotel or car hire relative to the stadium or city they are booking.

Google is showing personal profile results. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. They’ve added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn. Check out Google Profiles and add yours.

From time to time people may search for you or your organization via a search engine. We think it’s a good idea to therefore watch your online profile, employ good search engine optimization (SEO) services and make sure people are able to find you. Once you get this right, here’s a novel new design for your business card…