On the back of the recent affiliate wins, Fiona Robertson (nee MacPherson) has been hired by bigmouthmedia to head up the Affiliates and Performance service. As well as running the team that works on the affiliate campaigns, Robertson will be responsible for the overall growth strategy of bigmouthmedia’s affiliate and performance offering. Bigmouthmedia’s current affiliate clients include Best Western, Habitat, Macdonald Hotels and Kwik Fit Insurance, amongst many others.

Fiona, who sits on the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council, has over 6 years experience in affiliate and digital channel marketing and her most recent positions have been at WPP’s MediaCom and Glasgow-based Equator as Senior Affiliate Manager, where she developed affiliate and direct response strategies for a number of high profile clients. Fiona’s main focus will be to integrate affiliate marketing fully into the overall bigmouthmedia offering, spotting key areas for growth and ensuring that affiliate strategies fit seamlessly within the clients’ business models.

“We are delighted for Fiona to be joining the bigmouthmedia team”, said Robin Richmond, head of Digital at bigmouthmedia. “Her experience building performance-led strategies will be of massive benefit to our clients affiliate marketing campaigns. We are also seeing a definite uptake on our affiliates and performance services offering by new and existing clients as part of more comprehensive cross-digital marketing packages. Companies are becoming more aware of the synergies and added value that a single supplier can bring on board, and the recent growth of bigmouthmedia’s affiliates and cross-digital teams is a reflection of this new market trend”.

Bigmouthmedia reports that Google’s latest changes to its trademark policy will make pay-per-click advertising more attractive for comparison sites.

The press conference announcement means that from September 14th 2010 the UK will now follow Google’s existing US AdWords policy, which allows any advertiser to use trademarked keywords within their advert text in some cases. Using trademarked terms in advertising copy will remain outlawed in mainland Europe, but following the rule change keywords will no longer be protected from others bidding on them.

“Aggregators will now have the ability to use brand names in their adverts. This is likely to improve their click-through rates and quality score, and will therefore make it more attractive for such operations to bid on brand terms,” said Lyndsay Menzies, Chief Operations Officer at bigmouthmedia.

“In the UK the news may have a large impact on brand bids in industries such as finance, travel and electronics. While advertisers in mainland Europe will be unable to put trademarked terms in the advertising copy of their campaigns, the changes are still likely to have a big impact on brand budgets.”

Bigmouthmedia believes that Google’s decision to allow anyone to bid for trademarked keywords across Europe is widely predicted to lead to price rises in the markets affected. When this happened in the UK – where the policy change was first rolled out in 2008 – bidding on some brand terms increased by as much as 500% in the short term. The hike was relatively short lived mainly due to British brands’ unwillingness to get involved in bidding wars, although this may not be the case in other European countries and brand bidding may break out in earnest.

Via EPR Network
More Internet & Online press releases