Good news for naughty affiliates. Nightmare for real brands.
Google are moving inline with their policies in the US/Canada.
We’re writing to inform you that we’re changing our trademark complaint procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how we handle the trademark complaint you currently have on file with Google.
If you’ve submitted a complaint letter requesting that we prevent advertisers from using certain trademark terms anywhere in their ad text, we will continue our efforts to support your request. However, from May 5, 2008, our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This will bring our procedure in line with the approach taken in the US and Canada. Complaints received on or after today will be processed under our revised procedure.
You do not need to file your trademark complaint with us again unless you would like to amend it based on the new guidelines. For more detailed information regarding our trademark complaint procedure, we invite you to review our revised complaint procedure, posted online at http://www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html.
To learn more about this trademark policy revision, please visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.
Sincerely,
Advertising Legal Support Team
More details on the upcoming policy change here.
The new policy will have a big impact on advertisers brand bidding, providing opportunities to bid against competitors brands while of course making it more difficult to protect your own.
Read more about understanding when to bid on your own brand here.
Once again Google rides roughshot over the search marketing industry and shows a total lack of respect for both clients and agencies. All while hiding behind heir standard answer to everything – improved user experience – bla bla bla!! Sorry enough ranting!
I work for a UK based agency and am interested in hearing how you guys in the US dealt with the trademark policy change back in 2004. I’m specifically keen to know how volatile the market was in the first few weeks/ months and if there are any learings I can apply to my campaigns.
Cheers.
April 20th, 2008