Les Jones

E-commerce > Google Adwords's Latest Idiocy

I was already mad at Google Adwords over this. Now I'm mad again because they've removed our ads for one of our product lines.

The reason? It's a trademarked name and the trademark owner requested it. So I even though I'm an authorized ------- reseller and can sell ------- brand, I can't buy the ------- keyword on Google, which effectively means I can't advertise ------- brand to customers who are searching for ------- using Google. How stupid is that?

Here's the email I received from Google:

Hello,

In response to a request made by the trademark owner of '--------,' we
have removed the from your keyword list and disapproved an ad with the
term in the ad text. The trademark owner notified us that your AdWords ads
were running on the trademarked term without the trademark owner's
permission or other legal authority for doing so. Please note that this
also applies to misspellings and variations. You can learn more about
Google's trademark policy at: http://www.google.com/tm_complaint.html.

If you believe you should be able to use '---------' as a keyword and/or
in the ad text, we ask that you please resolve that matter with the
trademark owner. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to email
us at adwords-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team