The first time, I checked by searching and found that many ads were still displaying the supposedly forbidden brand. I wrote Adwords and they told me they eventually will shut them down.
But, now I have another round of disapproved ads for another different ads, and this ads had been disapproved for two months. If I search from my country (Mexico) or from the USA, I see ads. Many ads containing the brand.
How does one get that permission?
According to what I read in Google, you have to write the brand owner and ask permission, but from what I see in the SERPS, many are very small advertisers, that I can tell didn't write to Big Software Manufacturer to get a written permission.
Trademark restrictions in AdWords aren't always just blanket prevention of everyone (except a few approved advertisers) from using the term in ad text. In one case, I even had a specific domain flagged -- if I used the flagged display URL/landing page, I got an error message about a trademark term in the ad text...if I used the same ad text with a different display URL/landing page, everything was fine. So it seems Google is quite flexible in the ways it can restrict advertisers from using trademarked terms.
When I had the domain flagged, it was a situation similar to your current issue with my account getting the trademark restriction but many other advertisers still using the same term. I found the CSRs to be useless when I was trying to figure out the problem...they gave me the same "the other advertisers will be reviewed also" lie. I eventually figured out on my own that it was just a specific domain I was using that was flagged (because the domain also had a trademark issue, as I later found out).
[edited by: Rehan at 2:03 am (utc) on April 14, 2008]
It could be that the trademark owner asked Google for your specific account to be forbidden from using the trademarked term in ad text.
That actually happened to one of my clients; the manufacturer singled him out specifically.
I know I've had ads in the past that have run for months with a TM term in them and then all of the sudden three or four out of maybe fifteen got flagged.
