BrandVerity
 

Speaking at SMX East

I’m speaking at SMX East panel Trademarks and Search – How have things changed Monday at 3:45.
Please stop by and say hello!

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 and [...]

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 [...]

We’re excited to announce that PoachMark has officially launched. With over 200 affiliate programs monitored, we’re confident that PoachMark meets the robustness standards that we’ve established internally for this milestone.
PoachMark is now monitoring the affiliate programs of top 5 e-commerce merchants and top 5 Internet advertisers along with niche online retailers. We think Stephen [...]

Summary of Search Engine Trademark Policies

Updated on May 21 to reflect Google’s worldwide trademark policy changes and recent moves in the US.

Google
Yahoo
Microsoft

Search Ads

Trademarks can be protected in:

—-Keywords used to trigger ads?
No (US/UK/JP + 190 countries)
Yes (FR, DE and most of Europe)
Yes
Yes

—-Ad text and title
No
No
No

—-Display URL
No
No
No

Type of protection:
All but resellers and informational sites
All but resellers [...]

Find us at PubCon!

I’ll be speaking on the Brand and Reputation Management Session.
Stop by the session or find me around the show.

BrandVerity Nomiated for PPC Semmy award

We were honored to be nominated for the Semmy Award for best PPC post of 2008 for our post on Search Engine PPC Trademark policies.

Our thanks and gratitude to the nominating committee!

PPCHero has a great post that discusses why trademarked terms are allowed in display URLs:
Basically, a company can have a trademarked name as a real sub-domain on their site for site architecture purposes. Example, using the same Nike reference, if I own a website called shoesgalore.com, and I have a full page of [...]

Microsoft AdCenter blog on Competitive Bidding

One of the things that I forgot to mention in my second talk at PubCon was that the search engines will provide you very little trademark defense if your trademark utilizes a generic term.  Microsoft provides a good overview of their trademark policies on a recent post on the AdCenter blog.  Note this section:
Is the [...]

My slides from the Domains and Trademark Issues panel at PubCon are here. I went through a number of tools that website owners can use to find abuse in domains and PPC.
Clarke Walton provided an overview of trademark law and a good case study involving pubcon.com Deborah Wilcox profiled the default judgment against Punch-Clock.com [...]

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