Competitors product names in the USA & Canada

What is the legal situation?

[pmkpmk]

For a campaign targeting the USA & Canada it would be nice the use a competitors product names as keywords. The competitors product is kown to have a couple of flaws, so the campaign would go along the lines of "Trouble with competitiveproductname? Try ourwidgets instead!"

Can anyone shed some light on the legal situation?

Thanks!

[kay_s]

As far my awareness one cannot use the competitor's name if it is a trademark of the company(legally). I have derived the conclusion based on microsoft(mikerowsoft) and playboy cases(someone was using term 'playboy 'in the metatag). Though it is a common practice now a days and such cases becomes an issue only if the campaign is successful.

Keywords are supposed to be targeted to the comsumers(keeping product in mind)and if the product is differentiated well in market(off-line),I don't think it would be much difficult to find appropriate KW for its online campaign.apart from KW there are several other factors which contributes to the SEO such as excellent content, great meta tags and a good number of incoming links all relative to the theme of the site etc.Developing unique online strategy would be a useful for future.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Pmkpmk, a read through the following linked-to pages should give you details you need:

What is Google's trademark policy?
[adwords.google.com...]

How do I file a trademark complaint in the U.S. or Canada?
[adwords.google.com...]

How do I file a trademark complaint outside the U.S. and Canada?
[adwords.google.com...]

Note: For future reference, the above links may all be found on this page:

Editorial and Site Guidelines
[adwords.google.com...]

AWA