Do you know what’s happening to your trademark on Google?
In this guest post, MEC’s Alex Hancocks suggests that Google is not doing enough to protect brands from having their trademarks being hijacked in paid search.
Is Google organising the world’s information and making it more universally accessible and useful, or not?
Google recently announced an important update to their trademark policy for advertisers targeting Australian users via the Adwords platform. ‘From 23 April 2013, Google will no longer monitor or restrict keywords in response to trademark complaints for ads served to users in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Brazil’.
Google states that “We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all”.
Great read. Great suggestion by @chrishobbs
Reminds me of a seminar I attended a few years back now where the marketing dude from Virgin Blue was talking about how they police paid search results.
A search for “Virgin Blue” back in the day would turn up loads of SEM results for various travel agents and companies who resold Virgin flights and who Virgin pay commisions to do so. Virgin decided that if somebody should search for “Virgin Blue” then that is their brand and the only paid results should be Virgin results. If you Google “Virgin Blue” today Virgin is the only paid result. They were happy to pay commissions to travel agents getting business for searches such as “cheap flights”, but not for searches associated with their brand.
I think it is poor form, almost sabotage, when 3rd parties, or even worse competitors, purchase brands that are not theirs’. I do think that Google should have a responsibility here; because they are allowing corrupt unethical marketeers to be evil – which goes against Google’s mantra…
It would be a big police and a big mission for Google, however they need to start coming to the table and being a responsible publisher. They also need to be responsible with Youtube; e.g. with all the derogatory comments; they need to be the ‘un-evil’ citizen they market themselves to be.
is this good or bad for users?
I would argue that the visible URL given would be an example of misleading and deceptive conduct surely actionable under the old Trade Practices Act or whatever it is called these days
My view is that this is a smart / slightly cynical move by Google to free up large amounts of keyword inventory that has been locked up with the trademark restrictions.
From what I can see there are two types of “brand transgressions” occurring following this change:
-The straight forward brand hijacking plays (like the tiger / edreams example)
– Inadvertant broadmatching mis-fires: I suspect that brands may alsobe losing traffic to advertisers with a poor handle on the use of broad match keywords. Essentially it looks like advertisers maybe being inadvertantly matched against branded / partially branded keyword sets. (This change further highlights the importance of having a good handle on how match types are employed within Adwords).
Both scenarios can erode branded traffic volumes for unwary advertisers and will likley lead to a bump in click costs. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the coming months.
Thanks for the comments. @Betty. Yes, you would think Google would treat the URL issue as being misleading and deceptive…
@Dan. The keyword match issue should not be ignored. We have seen a few clients’ brand terms increase in cost since 24th April. Looking at the Auction insights report for set keywords, we can see this is mainly from other brands not using match types correctly and matching to brand + type terms.
I understand that Google no longer polices advertisers using competitors’ brand names but I believe it is still an infringement of copyright to do so.
Have a read of this legal comment: http://www.vmsolicitors.com.au/blog/
I guess we’ll have to see a test case before the dust settles on this.
It is worth noting that the recent update brought Australia in to line with the rest of the world, and the policy in the rest of the world has been live for years.
It’s no different from eDreams placing a print ad for Virgin flights on Sale,, which happens all the time and is seen as perfectly legal….
@Ben. Appreciate the policy update brings an alignment with the rest of the world. Print ads from official partners are fine in my eyes. The discussion here relates to edreams causing confusion by using trademarked terms within their display URLs (for several leading airlines) and publishing content on their website which would lure the unexpected consumer into believing that they are dealing directly with the brand owner. I am sure that this debate will continue.