Today is 2/14/2011, and to be quite honest, I don't know what to blog about.  This week, I have three great options:

With that said, I choose Bing's Intellectual Property Guidelines.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Microsoft AdCenter's Product Manager, Saleel Sathe at SES West in San Diego.  Saleel and I spoke for over an hour, and some interesting points were raised - including an upcoming change to the Intellectual Property Guidelines Microsoft has.  To be fair, Saleel asked me to keep this on the down low until Microsoft made it public, which it now has.
To give you some background on the previous Intellectual Property Guidelines upheld by Microsoft, until March 3rd, Microsoft AdCenter did not allow advertisers to bid on trademarked phrases of other competitors.  For instance, if an advertiser was to bid on a branded/trademarked term, they would see an error box similar to the one below:
Microsoft AdCenter, or Bing in general, would not allow advertisers to bid on trademarked terms.

Why would a user want to bid on trademarked terms?  Plenty of reasons!  In this online industry, bidding on your competitor's trademarked terms is called, "squatting", which is a grey area in online marketing.  Here's a few reasons advertisers love to squat on their competition's trademarked word:
  • Advertisers can reap the benefits of branded marketing efforts.  If the squatted company has TV, radio, or any other type of traditional broadcast media, an advertisers can squat on these marketing dollars and make a percentage of your media spend
  • Advertisers can trick consumers into believing that they are a trusted resource or entity, when in all actuality they may be falsely advertising
So, previously, Microsoft had a very firm policy which did not allow this type of squatting on trademarked content to go on.  This provided Bing with a unique selling proposition and a nice enticement to try Bing's search engine out if you've experienced this type of squatting on Google.  
Today, Bing's new policy will allow this type of silly squatting, which I'm sure they believe will lead to more revenue and gross profit in 2011.

Alas, Bing has officially let a lot of us down, and ultimately, I believe it will suffer less revenue this year due to its new policy.  I know for a fact that the only reason some of my clients try out Bing is because of the amount of squatting going on with Google and other search engines.  I believe this is a sure fire way to lose some market share.
This new Intellectual Property Guidelines coupled with Microsoft's refusal to segment out Yahoo and Bing traffic for reporting purposes really makes me have a sour taste in my mouth for the new year of Yah-Bing.  We'll see if I'm right, and they do indeed lose market share.

Microsoft's Announcement of their new Intellectual Property Guidelines can be found here.  Yeah, I nofollowed that link on purpose.