The European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) provided an opinion last week that Marks & Spencer(M&S) violated Interflora’s trademark rights by purchasing (but not using) search keywords that contained Interflora’s marks. While the opinion was in Interflora’s favor, it hinged on a very specific set of circumstances that won’t necessarily apply to competitors in most industries. [...]

There’s a small but significant change being made to AdWords this week you should be aware of. Google announced they will now display only lowercase domains in ads, for example “Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory. . . will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory.” The change already has a few detractors and will doubtless accrue more, but Google has little cause to capitulate and gains more (like an increased [...]

Last week Google announced two significant changes to its trademark policies: The largest change will allow competitors to purchase trademarked terms in most of the European countries that were excluded in the May 2009 change. It brings the trademark policies in most European countries into alignment with its policy in 190 countries. The second change [...]

We’ve seen Google testing a number of different display elements in AdWords over the last few weeks. Store Ratings Google is pulling store ratings from Google Products and displaying the aggregate rating inline with ads. Below are the display treatments for the top and right rail ads returned for a search for ‘grills’: Condensed Site [...]

As expected, the European Court of Justice ruled today that Google is not liable for search ads purchased by competitors on search ads. As it stands now, TM owners can prevent all ads from displaying on trademarked terms in most European countries. In the US anyone can purchase ads on trademarked terms, and many advertisers [...]

Marc Bitanga recently created a flowchart for Google’s Adwords Trademark policy. Although the flowchart doesn’t address affiliates, shopping engines, etc. it does do a great job of visualizing many of the common trademark complaint cases. Also, although the graphic states that his flowchart is for the US, UK and CA, it only represents the US [...]

We’ve found a number of Google Places advertisements appearing on searches for ‘Brand + Product Category’ and include a link to a competitive local retailer. The advertisements represent an entirely new AdWords unit that we hadn’t seen before and seem to be designed specifically for Google Places. A handful of examples below: A search for [...]

An adviser to the European Court of Justice just issued an opinion that “Google has not committed a trademark infringement by allowing advertisers to select [trademarked] keywords”. While the opinion is non-binding, the court is generally expected to follow the opinion. Google has moved to aggressively open up trademark bidding in the US, the UK [...]

We’ve seen advertisements similar to the one below for “top-rated-coupons.com” appear in Yahoo search ads for a number of the programs that we monitor: The ads are typically shown for “brand” + coupon searches. This particular advertiser isn’t an affiliate though. They are actually selling a mobile recurring billing scheme that gives “access” to coupons [...]

Geno Prussakov has a great post on the AM Navigator blog about how recent changes to Google Suggest can help prevent trademark poaching. The screenshot below demonstrates a new way to bring up advertisements using Google Suggest: While Geno’s point is that: From the above image, it is obvious that Google Suggest puts the original [...]