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!

Google Testing New Ad Unit for Places Pages

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 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 [...]

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 website on the [...]

In December, a court awarded Verizon a $33.5M default judgment against OnlineNIC for typosquatting on 683 domain names such as verizonphnes.com. OnlineNIC, based in China, never even showed up at court.
While it might seem that a judgment such as this would be impossible to collect, the source for nearly all cybersquatting revenue originates [...]

Find BrandVerity at Affiliate Summit

A few members of BrandVerity Team will be out at Affiliate Summit.
Our CEO, David Naffziger, will be speaking on the ‘Keeping your Affiliate Program Clean‘ panel.
We will also have a table at the Meet Market. Contact us if you’d like to connect while you’re at Affiliate Summit or just stop by.

Google Sued by Rosetta Stone

In early July, the Rosetta Stone launched a lawsuit against Google for trademark infringement through its AdWords program.
These lawsuits are not new, a number of brands have sued Google over the years. Eric Goldman counts 9 similar lawsuits currently making their way through the legal system.
This lawsuit is notable from the prior suits in [...]

We’re excited by the recent coverage that we’ve received on the launch of PoachMark. A few of the recent posts include:

Shawn Collin’s coverage on Affiliatetip
Evan Weber’s coverage at CostPerNews
Peter Prestipino’s coverage at Website Magazine

We’ve gotten substantially more interest in our service than we expected from this announcement and we’re excited to help an entirely [...]

Techcrunch has a good article on the latest conundrum facing affiliate managers: Izea (formerly PayPerPost) has begun introducing affiliate links to its network of sponsored bloggers.
While bloggers inserting affiliate links into their posts is nothing new (and not even necessarily bad), this particular incident is troubling for brand owners. The FTC has become increasingly [...]

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