Search News: Untangling Google’s New Trademark Rules
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 19, 2009 | Share This
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Google’s announcement this week that they are revising their trademark rules to allow more flexibility for advertiser’s to use other brand’s trademarks in search ad text caused quite a round of hand flapping and hair pulling. The gist of many of the takes on this, including the New York Times and BroadPoint’s Ben Shacter was that despite the possible legal ramifications Google is opening the door to say, Coke calling out Pepsi in search ad text. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Our reading of the changes are a bit more subtle and nuanced though surely, the great Google will be making more moolah as a result.
As Google has taken pains to point out, retailers are the big winners here. Finally they can advertise trademark brand names they carry without prior agreement or fear of repercussion. But will Coke actually drop Pepsi into their text?
Not without a landing page that mentions Pepsi as well – it’s in the rules. Coke also can’t use text like “Check out the new Pepsi,” that’s still a no-no. So what’s changed?
Google will no longer monitor for these types of violations. Registering trademarks with Google (as has been the practice) will be a nonstarter because it will be up to the trademark holder to raise a red flag, not Google’s staff.
This kills two birds with one stone for Google. Whoever they had staffed to deal with trademark monitoring can go somewhere else within or without the Googleverse. More importantly, Google no longer sees themselves as liable for trademark infringement and enforcement. What they do police – the landing page – is strictly for the sake of user experience. Voila, money saved on staff, precedent set.
Of course it won’t stop the suing, people are suing over keywords after all, you can be sure they’ll sue over text.
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Topics: Google, Google: AdWords, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Bid Management, SEM: Paid Search, Search: News |