There are benefits to bidding on your brand name, and drawbacks. If you do, great, if you don't, should others?
You spent a long time and a lot of money to build your brand, and someone is trying to cash in on that and steal your customer when they are ready to shop with you.
Who done it? Was it an affiliate? A competitor? A shopping comparison site? There are an endless supply of suspects. You may have budget constraints that make it more cost effective to allow a partner to bid on your name. That may be the case with some of the examples here, but I suspect there are some sinister forces at work too.
Catching these guys can be hard. Brand name keyword bidders can geo-target their bids so that search results in your geographic location exclude their trespassing. Sometimes they strike in the dead of the night while you are asleep. Even if the culprit is dumb and lazy, Google doesn't always show all the bidders on a specific term for a given search... You need to be a little obsessive compulsive (I'm guilty) to catch these guys.
I think I've found a way to circumvent some of the filtering that goes on in Google. Their search results in places where they syndicate their search seems to include ALL the bidders for a given term. So you get different search results on places like MySpace (where I got these samples).
If you are bidding on someone else's brand name (without their consent), a pox on your family. If you are hanging out at MySpace, look me up and invite me over....imbarber
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