Google’s surprise decision to change its trademark policy will effectively remove protection brands have from rivals, or impersonators bidding on their trademarked paid search terms. It’s also expected to have an impact natural search, but that will, naturally, take longer to be felt and may not be quite as obvious as you first think.

Google has justified the move as simply reflecting users’ behaviour, and that it will give the person searching access to far more choice, thereby improving the overall quality of results. However it will present a new brand protection nightmare for companies already facing more, evolving online brand threats than they can shake a stick at.

Having worked with a number of companies, specialising in various aspects of the online brand protection picture I can see a major similarity in what Google is allowing to what has existed in the ICANN governed domain names industry since year dot. There are currently over 150million registered domain names around the world and estimates I’ve heard suggest that around 25 per cent of all those registrations are speculative or opportunistic (by cybersquatters, domain name warehousers and those engaged in kiting). If that’s the scale of the threat, you can only imagine the scale of defensive registrations being made by brand owners where easily more than two-thirds of your portfolio of names could be purely to stop a rival or speculator acquiring it and doing your brand damage.

The domain names industry is that way for a reason - and that’s the relatively loose ‘first come first served’ principle of registrations (for search read: ‘highest bid, first listed’) but until now, with one very major difference - in domain names there is very little practical or enforceable protection for brand owners beyond being first up, whereas in search there was always Google’s common sense.

While Google’s move may help address the slow in growth of clicks on paid Google ads, perpetrated by the search engine’s bid to ensure more relevant, better quality results, it could all too quickly degenerate into the free-for-all model of the domain name industry.

Marketers are already struggling to keep rising paid search costs in check and if this plays out the way many fear it might then likely two things will happen:

1. The current increased interest in natural search will swell dramatically and impact investment in paid search - after all an increasing number of voices are joining the chorus that natural search delivers better quality leads at a fraction of the CPA

2. Major brands will need to agree a code of conduct between themselves to avoid needlessly burning budgets trying to outbid the other’s trademarks and instead focus on dealing with the far more serious threat posed to their brand value by counterfeiters, cybersquatters and impersonators who won’t think twice about taking advantage of the new system.

Google endured a second straight month of poor growth in paid search clicks, and that has brought out the usual scaremongers (the same that were predicting the end of social networks earlier this year when traffic growth plateaued) are saying it’s bad news for the market and showing that fears of a recession have truly hit online revenues.

Lets take a look at the facts:

1. The actual figures from Comscore show a 3% year-on-year rise during February in paid search clicks. The slowdown comes after Google began implementing a new system to cut down accidental clicks on paid search listings

2. Google’s move to stamp out irrelevant clicks is good news for the long term as it will increase the relevance of paid search and make it an even more efficient format.

So is the (non)recession having an impact? Well, traditionally in a time of recession marketing spend gets cut back to tried and tested methods that deliver strong and measurable ROI, such as direct marketing. Search marketing falls into that same category and certainly many of the people I’ve spoken to in the first quarter of this year can see certain aspects of their budgets being cut if times get tighter, but search isn’t one of them.

But beyond what Google has done, and all the scaremongering, there are still some changes afoot. Paid search costs continue to inflate and speaking to some search marketing firms, they are beginning to find - and some scared to find - that clients are looking more seriously at natural search, and increasing their investment in search engine optimization.

There is an ongoing threat to the paid search market - not to its existence, but to the way it’s used - there has for some time been a growing school of thought that natural search delivers better quality leads to your site and Google’s latest moves can be seen, in part at least to be a clear attempt to arrest that movement and safeguard the quality of clicks on paid search. The short-term blip is nothing to worry about - a blip is all it is - and if there is a recession, it’s not search that should be worried about budgets.

6. PCTV wins the battle with IPTV
Early next year we are likely to see both 02 and Orange join the battle with BT Vision and others to displace the Sky, Virgin and Freeview set-top boxes in our living rooms. As they spend big to each attract at most a few hundred thousand subscribers, millions of consumers will instead top up their TV viewing online. The implications of the Kangaroo initiative, which will bring together the on-demand services from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 shouldn’t be underestimated. Kangaroo has the potential to bring PCTV into the mainstream via a single application and EPG. But it will need to quickly become compatible with all those Vista enabled PCs people will have got for Christmas.

In fact one of 2007’s most exciting moves for both online broadcasting and social networking, was Bebo’s landmark deal with the likes of the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and Endemol to allow users to embed TV programmes in their profiles. A fundamental shift in taking TV to specific communities rather than trying to attract specific communities to TV. The implications of the deal for much hyped but little used services like Joost should be keeping their investors awake at night.

Finally, as millions stream TV content to their desktops, the spotlight will again turn to the performance levels of broadband providers. Download limits and throttling connections will be exposed as the disingenuous excuses for poor service they really are. ISPs and telecoms companies will need to think carefully about where they direct their infrastructure investment, or face a very public consumer backlash.

7. DIY Social Networking
Want to create your own social networking site? Of course you do and so will everyone else, well maybe. As I wrote recently vertical social networks are gathering momentum. With so many categories currently un-catered for, it will be a boom year for the software companies providing off-the-shelf solutions. Many firms will also see the benefits of creating their own social networks as a replacement or as an alternative to expensive and cumbersome corporate intranets and extranets. Whether they will give their staff enough time to use them is of course another question.

8. Traditional media decline accelerates
David Crow at The Business has a great analysis on the seismic shifts in the media landscape this year and the likely developments in 2008. To reverse the general declines in newspaper circulations, more national newspapers will need to follow the example of the Daily Telegraph and invest in their digital operations. The amalgamation of the BBC’s offline and online news operations could lead to a decline in both the quantity and quality of online content, allowing other news organisations to catch-up. The Wall Street Journal liberated from a hefty subscription by Rupert Murdoch, will also be a new force to be reckoned with. Crow also looks ahead to the growth of DAB radio with Channel 4 launching a number of stations to compete directly with the BBC. He concludes by saying, “The firms that succeed in 2008 will be those that focus on the needs, desires and interests of their consumer in the contemporary marketplace – and discard their archaic, elitist prejudices born of a different era. For those still referred to as the “traditional” media, 2008 will be the make or break year.” Couldn’t agree with him more!

9. The Press Release’s condition becomes terminal
In response to the traditional media going increasingly digital, the demand from journalists for well packaged multimedia content will be stronger than ever before. The SMNR and Social Media Newsroom will become the industry standard for modern communication with press and bloggers. The days of four pages of double-spaced waffle will thankfully be nigh.

Google struggles with the forces of darkness

Once one of the most loved of internet brands, ordinary internet users will begin to reassess their warm relationship with Google. As with its recent announcement to obliterate Wikipedia, the brand will behave in a way that challenges Microsoft for its evil empire crown. While doing little to damage revenues at first, the loss of public goodwill will prompt a harder line from the competition authorities and legislators, curtailing the extent of Google’s long-term growth. In 2008, while its takeover of Skype gets through, its hostile bid for Apple is seen as a step too far.

Online display advertising and online sponsorship will hold up advertising market and take the lion’s share of ever-increasing online spends. That bold assertion is the key finding of a report from Convera, a US-based vertical search firm. It cuts clearly against the rest of the industry consensus that paid search and social media will take a greater share of the online budget.

So what’s the real beef? Well as CPM and PPC costs continue to swell, they occupy very specific niches. CPM for brand awareness and paid search for leads. But social networks lilke Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are all carving out ever larger slices of the online spend as marketers begin to understand how they can make them work to generate quality leads that are more likely to become paying customers.

Will publishers earn more from display ads and sponsorships in 2008? The larger players, namely portals such as MSN, AOL and Tiscali will continue to cream revenue off channel sponsorships. But as social networks account for an increasing volume of overall Internet traffic (and in November accounted for over 5 per cent of UK internet traffic, overtaking webmail sites) the money will shift in line with where the lion’s share of the available advertising inventory is, meaning publishers will need to become more creative and go beyond simple display and sponsorship opportunities that were the bread and butter of the glory days of 2000.