I'm sure that we have both lawyers and AdWords experts in this forum that will be able to expand on these areas :)
If the brand is trademarked, your competitor can approach Google and ask them to take down your ad for that keyword. Google will disapprove the keyword if your competitor complains.
Unfortunately, it just feels dirty to do that. If you've ever looked up the dictionary definition for 'leach' it does seem to fit here.
Don't be offended though, I even tried this with one of the bigger names in my area. Unfortunately I didn't get any traffic from the queries and they were eventually dropped. What I learned was that my competition was getting traffic from some keywords that I hadn't discovered yet, and almost nobody was searching for their name specifically. (I mean at most 1 per month)
You should try to find out if people are actually searching for that name, it could be that your competition is getting better traffic with a set of keywords that you havn't discovered.
If you are trying to ride their coat tails, you are never going to take the lead.
Its about meta tags but I'd think it'd apply to this situation since they are functionally the same thing.
With regard to the first issue, there is a lot of precedent in the print and television world for what constitutes fair use of a trademarked or copywritten term. These precedents seem to be directly applicable to questions one may have regarding use of the trademarked term in an advertisement.
Regarding question 2, I think a fair analogy to this advertising situation in the non-internet world is an advertisement placed in the yellow pages of a phone book.
For example, I may want to order a pizza from "Dominoes Pizza" and go to the yellow pages to look up its phone number (analogous to a seach on google). When I find the page listing the "Dominoes Pizza" phone number (analagous to the search results page), I may also see an ad for "Pizza Hut" on that same page (analagous to the adwords ad) and decide to call them instead. No problem.
It seems to me that yellow page ads are a well accepted and non-controversial. Placing relevent ads on search results pages should be equally non-controversial.
If you have nothing to do with the term don't bid on it. Especially if it's a trademarked one.
If your business can't survive on it's own merits then you surely have more to worry about than stealing a competitor's AdWords.
Work on establishing your own name recognition!
stealing a competitor's AdWords
Paying google for the adwords is far from stealing.
Paying google for the adwords is far from stealing.
Sorry, I should have said, "hijacking". ;)
I just feel strongly about this because it happened to me and it was very frustrating/annoying. AdWords did resolve the issue after about three weeks of correspondence.
You shouldn't have to bid on the name of your own company!
You shouldn't have to bid on the name of your own company!
Of course, you don't have to, but you may be missing out on some business if you don't.
I'm sure it pisses off companies like Pepsi & Coke when safeway makes their generic colas then proceed to mimic their packaging style and places the safeway soda right next to pepsi.
Safeway is basically hijacking the brand recognition and product placement...Thus, safeway is taking away some Pepsi/Coke sales but I don't see it as an unethical business practice...
I don't see much of a difference in reasoning when it comes to adwords.
I don't see much of a difference in reasoning when it comes to adwords.
I'm not sure about the details of your Safeway comparison. If your talking about Safeway private labeling a cola and selling it in their own stores, then I think there's a HUGE difference.
I do agree that if you need to bid on the name of your company you should.
