According to a recent PPC Blog post, big changes are in the office for UK advertisers. Rumour has it that Google is to loosen the current rules concerning bidding on trademarks in the UK, to be more in line with those found over in the US and Canada

The move will mean UK advertisers can now bid on trademark terms, when previously they were not able to. However like the US version, advertisers will not be able to include trademarked terms within their content.

Director for Google UK, Matt Brittin said the company’s goal was to give consumers, “greater choices to help them make informed decisions”. Brittin went on to say that since introducing the policy in the US and Canada in 2004, Google had “learned that users found the greater number of ads relevant and helpful”.

Such a move in the UK though is likely to throw the cat amongst the pigeons somewhat and I would suggest further enhancement of SEO campaigns and budgets in response to this is likely, particularly in industries such as the finance sector where the levels of variation in search bevahiour also contributes to a lesser long tail than say the travel sector, and where significant paid search marketing budgets are found. Potentially this is a significant move from Google and one which could have huge knock on effects on the paid search industry as a whole.
A full overview of the proposed changes can be found here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.