Web Marketing / Advertising ContractsThe template documents in this section of the website are designed to help publishers, advertisers, merchants, affiliates and others regulate their online marketing and advertising efforts.
The internet has given rise to new ways of marketing and advertising products and services. At any one time, there are a vast range of different marketing advertising ideas being tried, tested, discarded and evolved. Perhaps the key internet marketing strategies are:
- Search engine optimisation: the battle for higher rankings in the search engine results pages has become a key part of many businesses' marketing strategies
- Pay-per-click advertising has grown from nothing to a multi-billion pound industry in a few short years.
- Email marketing: this has been around since the early days of the internet and, despite the tide of email spam that fills our inboxes, is still going strong.
- Affiliate marketing: this type of marketing involves merchants making payments (very often commission-based payments) to affiliates who send them visitors and customers, and supports many thousands of small (and not so small) businesses.
With a couple of important exceptions, the legal principles that govern internet-related marketing and advertising are much the same as the principles that govern offline marketiing. Issues common to both online and offline worlds include the licensing of copyright materials used in advertising, the potential liabilities for a publisher of advertisements arising from the advertisements themselves and the risks of a taking collateral damage if a marketing partner's reputation is seriously degraded.
Some of the most important legal differences between online and offline marketing and advertising arise (in the UK) out of the provisions of the Ecommerce Regulations. These regulations include special defences that may apply where a web publisher (in the Euro-jargon of the Regulations, an "information society service provider") is merely hosting and transmitting advertising content, but does not have any involvement in the production or approval of the advertisements. |
