Oone of our client's competitors was top on our client's brand name after bidding for the search term.
the title being "do to client come to us instead"
obviously i phoned up and expressed my disapointment
They did eventually remove it but, not because it was using a competitors brand name rather because there was no content on our client.
I was told that its ok to bid for a competitors brand name as long as I have content about the competitor on our site.
I think it is highly unethical.
(edited by: welshwayne at 1:58 pm (gmt) on Nov. 16, 2001)
Slime!
however the legal costs would be too high to challenge.
a few grand for a few ppc clicks
only way i see is to get everyone you know to flood the link. thereby, spend their budget for them. but this is unethical too!
Some may remember that they wanted a letter from the end user client authorising the SEO to place bids and manage a client account.
One of the their many reasons for this was to prevent people from bidding on terms, trademarks etc that were not theirs to bid on. Those more cynical (realistic?) about these matters commented at the time that GoTo were simply trying to build a database of end user clients from SEO's to poach and approach direct.
So much for them checking out every bid/URL for relevance to the term. Perhaps GoTo (I am also having trouble saying 'Overture') should start bidding on the terms: 'short term business strategies' or looking at pages themselves that relate to 'building effective relationships'!
If you had not followed up it would have remained up there above your client. Well done.
Although, I'm also glad to hear it was amicably resolved.
I'm off to evaluate the opportunities (positive and negative). ;)
my client doesn't sell products to its rival who had the bid.
plus the title of the bid was
"don't try 'myclient' try us instead.
This wasn't a problem to overture. they only cancelled the bid because the there was no content on my client in their site.
I do some of my work for a consumer advice site. Naturally, a huge amount of the content is about other companies, their brands and their products. According to what has been said up above (so far) I should not be able to list this site on its actual content?
I can tell you right now that I optimise for many other companies brandnames, and product names and rightly so. The majority of people online so far use the Internet mainly to research their purchases and prefer to actually buy them offline. There are exceptions of course, but that is the general trend.
I am doing my job for my company and for those users only by ensuring that the independant reviews by actual users and customers of the products and services (whose brand names are not ours) they want more information about can be found quickly and intuitively.
Just thought I'd throw that in the mix for due consideration.
Bear in mind also that an author's name is a trademark and never in my knowledge owned by the booksellers who optimise for it. How many electrical retailers have permission to use the trademarks of Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, JVC, etc. etc.
Let's not confuse unfair use of a competitor's name and trademarks with fair use.
Unfair use is to deliberately compare your products to his just so you can mention his names in your copy.
Fair use is when you could not realistically have content at all without including the names. If the name is vital, essential, central to your content then it is only fair that you be able to be ranked for it on the PPC engines, just as you can be ranked for it on traditional engines.
Ammon Johns
In this case the rival has clearly used the name solely to cash in on its popularity and recognisability.
Overture are very wrong if they accept this nature of bid.
SEs and Directories should not be put in the position of making legal judgements on every submission.
Trademark's a different issue, though. Trademark laws exist to protect the consumer from being mislead, but often manifest themselves in compensation given to the trademark owner.
I don't really see who's being mislead if the ad' reads "don't try 'myclient' try us instead". If it said "we are 'myclient' try us now" I'd be down on them like a ton of bricks. :)
Personally I find the "Sony television" suggestion from Overture's May 2001 guidelines deeply troubling. I really think it should be "Sony television outlet" or some-such, but then I (fortunately) am not a lawyer.
welshwayne, you did the right thing to appeal to overture, it doesn't do them any good to be seen to be taking money for other peoples' names. If you can get them quietly to do what you want you save a whole lot of hassle.
I agree if the client sells other people products they can bid for other people's brand name. Its ethical.
If you are consumer advice site you can bid for brand names too. its ethical.
We all know legal action costs too much and is too lengthy in time and resources
The problem is overture didnt take it down because of an unfair use of a brandname. iI was beacuse the site had no content. Effectively, Overture have told me they would have had no problems with the bid if there had been content on the competitors about my client.
Now that is unethical, we all no.1 rankings get more traffic than no. 2. effectively they saying I should bid higher for our clients name.
What was funny was i said i wanted to bid for search term 'overture' on behalf of espotting and mirago they said no. One rule for one, one rule for another. I said i had written content too.
If you are trying to use anothers brand or brand names to gain competitive advantage, without their permission, this is known as 'passing off'.
Regardless of Overture's obviously ill-informed line on this, it is illegal to do this and there are clear legal guidelines regarding improper usage of anothers registered trademarks or brands. I am no 'barrack room lawyer' but you may remind them that they would be liable if you or your client have informed them of this and they choose to ignore it.
Can I suggest that your client obtains a solicitors letter explaining this situation and sends this to the CEO/MD of Overture in the UK.
Try selling software under the name 'Micro-soft' and see what happens!
There are two issues here.
The competitors site and the third party carrying the material.
The fact that the competitors' site has bid using someone else's terms is not about ethics, it's about the law. Copyright is a useful tool to protect owners of Intellectual Property from chancers and thieves.
As far as accepting the bid is concerned, it's simply about money. Although, if a site legally carries content because they are authorised to do so, then, why not place the higher bid further up the rankings: The authorised distributor and the manufacturer.
A site carrying the copyright, trademark or content of an owner without permission should be dealt with by recourse to the applicable law. There may be no need to engage a solicitor/lawyer when a simple request to cease and desist will suffice.
I too am no lawyer, however, the third party carrying the "advertisement" needs to ensure it is not breaking any local laws by carrying the material. It may be an interesting case and set a legal president.
I agree with Markd's approach.
I know of a company which I understand trademarked their part numbers.
As I understand it, this allowed them to take legal action against a significant competitor who was storing their partnumbers in an equivalents database, in their offices.. but it could have been online at a later date.
My understanding is that the company won and the database had to be destroyed.
Mark
I then referred to this situation and was assured in no uncertain terms that it is the absolute policy of Overture *NOT* to accept the kinds of bids discussed in this thread.
Now that of course is not to say that one won't occassionally slip through for a while, but I'm assured that Overture will act to remove any such listings that are reported.
It could perhaps be that what we have here is one of those small misunderstandings of emphasis that the Internet has made commonplace. Perhaps Overture were simply trying to say that [u]even if it were not policy to refuse/remove this kind of unfair listing[/u] that this one still should have been refused on the grounds of no content on that search term?
Whatever, Claire Burstow at Overture UK has said that it is policy to refuse/reject listings of this kind.
Hope that helps clarify what Overture UK state as their position, and gives a name to go with that clarification in case of future concerns.
Ammon Johns
But do I hope that Overture clearly states this on their site and makes all of their 'account managers' aware of this policy statement so there are no future 'misunderstandings'.
The posts in this thread certainly give the impression that this was not 'one that slipped under the wire', but a concerted effort to 'get the money' and worry about the consequences later, particularly noting WelshWaynes comment...
<< it was removed not because it was using a competitors brand name rather because there was no content on our client. >>
It is this lack of consistency with site reviews, PFP schemes etc. that gives us all unecessary headaches.
Lets hope Overture leads the way now with clear guidelines and a refusal to accept bids which clearly break the rules.
An Overture spokesman, Jim Olson, essentially ruled out such a possibility, saying that if a company bid on a term that was a trademarked name of another company, such a bid would only be accepted if the content on the bidding company's site was relevant to the trademark holder — not as simply a gambit for siphoning off a rival's traffic
So Overture, as a matter of policy, will accept bids on a trademarked name from companies other than the holder - given "relevant content"
Thats a bit of a grey area at best, wouldn't you say?
Yes, of course.
Just as "We only optimise for relevant keywords" is always going to be a grey area. We just can't write a simple rule to cover all situations in a complex business. That's true for SEOs and its true for PPC engines.
Ammon Johns
The 'content' may well be relevant to the trademark holder, even if the actual content is trying to gain advantage over that owner of the brand/trademark. In this situation, would the bid be allowed.
If so, and there is a clear abuse of a trademark and a resulting dispute, I would have thought this places Overture in a difficult if not legally compromised position.
Obviously, such a situation would not include a PC store who is a distributor for a well known brand, although I have had direct experience whereby the store had to have express permission from the brand owner to do this.
I do feel that this is still a very grey area!
Unfair use is to deliberately compare your products to his just so you can mention his names in your copy.
Fair use is when you could not realistically have content at all without including the names. If the name is vital, essential, central to your content then it is only fair that you be able to be ranked for it on the PPC engines, just as you can be ranked for it on traditional engines.
Naturally, that still leaves some grey area between the definitions, but then, that's how life is.
That's why the law is the judiciary, and not the book. One thing is always true - circumstances alter cases.
Ammon Johns
amazingly, I've had a similar problem again. and straightaway when I phoned up they said sorry and it was fixed in half an hour.
my guess is they have either changed the policy or more likely its really down to the view of the which account manager you get.
(edited by: engine at 8:25 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2002)
