Will 2010 be tough for UK SEM agencies?

How many SEM agencies in the UK have a sustainable business model? That may seem like an odd question given that search is undoubtedly the most successful advertising medium of recent years, but it would seem that the agency sector isn’t necessarily sharing in the medium’s growth.
Last week saw the adminstration then MBO of [...]

Who Owns an Adwords Account: the Client or the Agency?

Quite a fuss has been generated by an article in the latest issue of Marketing Week. In it, VCCP Search claim to be the first SEM agency to allow its clients to retain intellectual property rights over their search accounts.
This is a pretty outrageous statement. Many SEMs from other agencies (including myself) say [...]

A Closer Look at Tradedoubler’s Search Business

Right now I’m very interested to see how search is holding up in the current financial mire (see my previous post on Google UK’s 2008 performance and Efficient Frontier’s Q4 report). Tradedoubler’s Q4 2008 financial results came out yesterday and as they are a listed company there is a fair bit of disclosure. In [...]

Bidding on Competitors’ Brands 2

I nearly choked on my afternoon tea when I searched for 'Efficient Frontier' on Google today.  Sitting there, bold as brass, was an ad for one of our competitors:

Organising a Paid Search Marketing Team

Yesterday I noticed this question on LinkedIn:
What is the best structure for a Paid Search Marketing team?

How have you defined the roles within your teams?
Have you split your team into specialists or generalists?
Are you outsourcing some of your responsibilities?

I am particularly interested in what your experiences are in structuring a large Paid [...]

SES Chicago on European SEM

A colleague, James Beriker, spoke at SES Chicago on Monday about search marketing in Europe.  I like this excerpt, courtesy of the aimClear blog:
Many agencies charge clients nothing and keep commissions. Other agencies share some of the commission with the client. This will end at the end of 2008 making the market more accountable to [...]

Walmart SEM

From this week's NMA, an article on Google's BPF withdrawal: "[Google] admitted loopholes had been exploited… [some agencies] had used the discounts as bait in the pitch process."
And for some, the discount was their pitch – as seen this week at Adtech London!

Goodbye and good riddance to Best Practice Funding

The most predictable announcement in Search Marketing leaked out earlier today, when Google announced that they are to end their Best Practice Funding (BPF) after next year.
The BPF was introduced in 2006 after Google scrapped the 15% agency discount. It was brought in with the right intentions: partly as a parachute payment but mainly [...]

Netimperative Search Marketing roundtable

I attended a Netimperative Search Marketing roundtable last week to discuss bid management and the future role of agencies in search. It was a good debate but though we started on topic, we roamed through the full spectrum of digital media leaving no pixel unturned.
There seemed to be a sense that as Yahoo was [...]

Internet World

I spent part of last week at Internet World, a three day event at Earls Court Exhibition Centre. More accurately it was at ‘Earls Court 2′, a name entirely without imagination. Surely ‘Earls Court: The Reckoning’ or ‘Earls Court Strikes Back’ would have given it a bit more umph. Anyway, it is a [...]

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