Competitor Demands Negative Match

Quick, start a whole new company

[One Thing Well]

One of our competitors in a smaller hotel market has demanded we put the negative match for their brand in OUR adwords account.

Seems they are upset that a user search for "competitor Dreamland hotel" serves up our broad matched ad for "Dreamland hotel".

Haven't talked to my Google rep yet but I can't see anywhere in the guidelines where we can be compelled to put negative matches for all our competitors brand names in all our campaigns.

If we can, I'm going to start a new company called "Brand Police" and go to work.

What intrigues me, is that it looks like this has been effective for our competitor to some degree.

I'm not saying its a bad idea, I'm just saying there is no way they can compell us to do this... is there?

[sem4u]

I don't think that a company can demand that you (or Google) must put a trademark or brand name as a negative match keyword. Even with the trademark rulings you can still bid on the trademarks as long as they don't appear in the ads themselves.

However this is all probably subject to change as brand owners crack down on trying to protect their brands.

[BriGuy20]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, criticize.

I'm amazed that the competitor is concerned about competition on (what seems to be) THEIR OWN TERMS. Any company worth it's salt should be able to make a compelling, high-ranked (if not first-ranked) ad for their own company keywords. If they can't, they don't deserve to be reaping traffic from it and they CERTAINLY shouldn't be critical about other companies.

[ogletree]

What is Google rule about this? What does the law say about this?