An earlier 2010 ruling by the European Court Ruling stated that Google had not broken any laws by allowing a trademarked word to be sold like this, but then failed to decide whether the purchaser of the keyword – (in this latest case, Marks and Spencer) – was in breach of trademark protection rules and so left this open, which is where Interflora stepped in and commenced proceedings against Marks and Spencer.

The new statement on 24th or March 2011 seems pretty clear cut however a senior legal adviser at the European Union’s highest court said that advertisers cannot use keywords that correspond to trademarks if this use will confuse online consumers as to the origin of the goods or services.

Now bearing this in mind it leaves it open to argue if consumers are being confused as to the origin of the goods or service; One could say for example that if JD sports appeared on the Nike trademark then as long as the adcopy was clear that they were selling Nike products and not in any way trying to imitate or appear to be Nike then they could indeed show an AdWords advert when someone searched for “Nike” providing the advert clarified that consumers could buy Nike products direct from them even though they weren’t actually Nike.com,

Going on the legal statement one could argue that adcopy like “Authorised Nike Stockist, Buy Nike trainers direct from us. www.jdports.co.uk” would be acceptable however Nike couldn’t really appear on the JD sports trademark as they don’t sell JD sports own range of products.

The specific wording of the March 2011 statement was :

“The proprietor of a trademark is entitled to prohibit such conduct … in the case where that ad does not enable an average internet user … to ascertain whether the goods or services referred to in the ad originate from the proprietor of the trademark or an undertaking economically connected to it or from a third party,” said Niilo Jääskinen, advocate general.

The advocate general’s view is not binding on the European Court of Justice however they are followed most of the time by them, they rule on the interflora v Marks and Spencer case in a few months.

No doubt a few more court cases will probably be required to clarify the parameters even further.

BrandWatcher’s adcopy archive is a great way to see what your competitors have been saying in their adverts about you, your brand, your products and trademarks etc.

Keeping track of your brand space is far easier with BrandWatcher, if you are a merchant rather than you or a staff member doing searches on the terms you wish to monitor, clicking refresh, hovering over links to spot any direct affiliate link, clicking the links to see where they end up, then filling a spreadsheet in and having to report the offending affiliates to the network and then trade emails asking when, where, which term, what adcopy etc. you’ll find it’s very easy to spend just a few minutes per day (or even less after you’ve used BrandWatcher for a while) checking and reporting any affiliates with our quick two click reporting system direct to your account manager.

For networks and agencies the benefits are even more tangible, monitoring your clients brand space sucks time from expensive staff workloads which could be better utilised on marketing and growing your client base instead of policing the current one.

Why pay someone to do this work manually every day all month when we can do a far more comprehensive job with greater depth and coverage much cheaper.

BrandWatcher’s multiple report formats make monitoring and sifting the resulting data a cinch, you can view individual networks, display urls or even affiliate ID’s and see what’s been going on with your brand terms faster and esasier, we can even bespoke reports to see exactly what you need to see!

BrandWatcher aims to give you your data how you’d like to see it so despite having several different reports available we also offer the the choice of downloading it in to view in a spreadsheet.