Google wars

As outlined on the Enhance Media blog a couple of weeks ago and as Yoda once said 'Begun they have, the Google wars'. Since the start of this week restrictions have been lifted in the UK on sponsoring other people's brands and trademarks on Google adwords - for example Virgin Atlantic can now sponsor British Airways etc. It's been this way in the US for a couple of years, but is new to the UK market.

Some people have been upset about this, threatened to boycott Google adwords and are even talking about legal action. Despite this the adoption rates seem to be quite slow so far, we've recommended to our search advertising clients that they sponsor some key competitor brands and that we review and measure the activity after a month or so. We're also sponsoring some competitor brands in the research area with some interesting results. There's also someone (that I'd never heard of until now) sponsoring Enhance Media. But apart from that it looks fairly limited, there are a couple of recruitment consultancies sponsoring some of the leading job board brands, but interestingly in other sectors none of the mobile operators are targeting each other (have they come to an agreement?) and only flight booking sites (rather than rival airlines) are sponsoring British Airways.

I think this will work particularly well for smaller players that sponsor the brand name of the market leader in their sector, so many searches are still brand related and this offers the chance for smaller brands to deliver an exact message against leaders in their sector - for example (and this is made up, so anyone who actually knows anything about this, please forgive me) a user might search for a BMW 3 series and then get a message about a similar model from KIA that has the comparable features, is cheaper, but less well known, all of a sudden I'm presented with a choice and for the price of a click thru, KIA might have pinched a potential customer from their competitor.