Trademark use management remains one of the greater challenges for brands that maintain affiliate programs. Most of the sessions that I’ve been to so far touch on trademarks and their use/abuse at some point over the course of their talk.

Andy Rodriguez touched on setting and monitoring policies for keyword bidding in his Sunday session on ‘Affiliate Marketing Basics for Merchants’. He correctly identified these policies as frequently overlooked by new merchants.  In fact, we’ve seen evidence of PPC Policy abusers that target new merchants exclusively.

This morning, all of the speakers on the ‘State of the Ad Networks’ panel touched on the success of search marketing affiliates coupled with the challenges inherent in ensuring compliance of the affiliates.

I’m expecting similar points to be made in these sessions:

  • Anatomy of a great affiliate program (Monday, 1:30): “Panel of affiliates discuss the good and bad aspects of affiliate programs and how to structure the most attractive affiliate program.”
  • Compliance. Its more than a buzz word (Monday, 1:30): Although targeted more at state and federal laws, there are legal aspects to affiliate agreement compliance and those might be addressed here.
  • PPC Search: Disclosure vs. Free-for-All (Monday, 4:30): Kevin Lee from Did-it usually does a great job highlighting the issues, but he continues to assert that he could hide a campaign from detection.
  • Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing (Tuesday, 3:30): Trademark abuse is typically a contractual rather than legal issue, but I would expect the topic to come up at some point over the course of the discussion.

I’ll add content from these sessions as they progress.