February 2008

A client recently inquired about their competitors AdWords advertisements showing up when you searched on their company name. While I hadn’t researched the topic before, common sense gave me two guesses on what the policy would hold:

• Competitor trademarks cannot be used to initiate the display of AdWords ads (you cannot use a defensible trademark as a keyword to bid upon)
• Competitor trademarks cannot be used in AdWords adcopy

That was my initial thought. Then I thought it through a bit more. There are trademarks that would make this very difficult to adhere to (Target, Southwest, etc.). This would be a nightmare to monitor. How could they do it?

The answer: they don’t. Well, sort of.

A review of the AdWords Help Center validated the sum of my thinking. From the AdWords Help Center:

When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we only investigate the use of the trademark in ad text. If the advertiser is using the trademark in ad text, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in ad text in the future. Please note that we will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint.

So you can bid on a trademarked term, you just can’t use it in the ad text. Wow. That is pretty biased towards Google’s best interest. It creates bidding wars. Those trademarked brands must hate the policy. Can you imagine a Target vs. Wal-Mart keyword bidding war? United Airlines vs. Southwest Airlines? With Google’s (undisclosed) take as the auction-based ad broker, that must be an incredibly profitable policy.

Well, those types of wars don’t happen for the big boys, apparently that’s just reserved for the mom-and-pop shops. Here’s just a few examples where the policy is suspiciously absent:

Search term: target – AdWords ads: none
Search term: united – AdWords ads: none
Search term: southwest – AdWords ads: none

Doesn’t exactly seem fair, does it?

Of interest elsewhere on the web:

• AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure
• Pop Goes the Trademark? Competitive Advertising on the Internet – Shidler Journal of Law, Commerce+Technology
• American Airlines Sues Google Over Keyword Ads – Technology & Marketing Law Blog
• Will You Be Sued Over Your Ad Copy Usage – Search Engine Land

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