I know this has come up before but I couldn't fine a difinitive answer. Can you have you have for example your Sports Shoe store ad appear in response to a trademark term e.g. "Nike" or "Reebok". I know you can't have these terms in the ad title or description but what about as a bidded upon keyword? This is what Google says in "Trademark Complaint Procedure – Trademark rights in US and Canada": But later on, this is what they say in "Trademark Complaint Procedure – Trademark rights outside US and Canada" So I can use "Nike" as a keyword but not "Adidas". Is this correct?
I read a while ago on Joelonsoftware that you can bid on whatever keyword you want, regardless of trademarks. see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2004/12/15.html at bottom (the news link is now dead however)
I've been rejected because of triggering ads from trademarks in the past. I can't remember which one's right now. One thing to do is reverse the order of the words, if in fact the trademark is two words. So if you found you couldn't put an ad up on the keywords "martha stewart" you probably could for "stewart martha"
I believe there was a recent court case which impacted upon this policy. Google used to remove keywords which were trademarked if the offended party complained. Some years back one of my friends discovered that he could rake in sales for his real estate course by bidding on various iterations of "Carleton Sheets" (the infomercial guy). Then Google made him remove all the terms from his account (after about a year of making in thousands from his listings). Then, about nine months ago or so, I guess, there was a copyright case involving this very issue with G. The gist of the court's decision was that you can indeed bid on copyrighted and trademarked terms, but you still cannot use such terms in the ad copy or headline. That is, unless you're one of the 'big dogs' like Amazon.com who can do whatever the hell they like on Google, while the rest of us can only watch. Still, I have noticed that keyterms for brand names often get disabled or trialed after a brief run in my campaigns - but not always.
Ah, here it is, I found it. From Perry Marshall, one of the gurus of Adwords issued a message to his subscribers some months back: http://www.doyoursearching.com/article_6.shtml excerpt: Google AdWords: Bidding on Trademarked Names The US Federal judge ruled in Google's favor today - it *is* OK to bid on trademarked terms, like company names, brand names, etc. The giant insurance company Geico sued Google for allowing competing advertisers to dilute their brand on Google Adwords, but Judge Brinkema said "There is no evidence that this activity alone causes confusion." Bottom line for you: You can bid on trademarked names, you just can't use those names in your ads.
This is a bad copyright law. If we continue to accecpt this and not fight it, soon the big corps will be smart asses, ok they are already, and just continue to copyright words till we can no longer put any in type. That is really bad and we need to reject it.