Google to all trademarked names in AdWords advertisements

Jeff Bressler — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:34:10 +0000

Google recently announced that they have opened up their AdWords trademark policy to allow trademarked terms to trigger search ads. I was surprised that Google did not allow the use of trademarked product names in the past.

Google will now allow trademarked terms to be used within ad copy in certain circumstances in the U.S. beginning June 15th. If the advertiser meets certain criteria, they will be allowed to use trademarked terms in their ad copy, even if they don’t have permission from the trademark owner to use it.

As an example, under their old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text.

However, under the new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. Google believes that this change will help both their users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across their networks in the U.S.
Advertisers, who have previously had their ads disallowed for trademark violation, can now resubmit and have them evaluated under the new criteria.

What will be interesting to see for example is if a Google advertiser decides to us the trademarked name “Yahoo” in their ad. Will Google still consider this acceptable in their new copy write policy?

Share this Post:

CEOWORLD Magazine » AdWords

Google to all trademarked names in AdWords advertisements