Paid Search and Google guidelines for copy goods and trademarks

No later than yesterday, we received a business inquiry from a company based out of Asia. They have a number of web site which sell high quality copies of famous products to European products. This raised a number of issues we have not considered previously.


Before I start outlining the issues, let's imagine you are a start-up hungry for new business. A business opportunity like this pretty much meant we could make our first year of revenue, let alone expected earnings.


Beyond the ethical issues associated with helping companies selling fake goods, we took a closer look at what Google said about copy goods and trademark issues. We are not saying Google is the ultimate Net Supreme Court but they provided a decent set of principles.

''Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.'' In other words, Paid Search advertisers are judged responsible for the ads they service. ' Google prohibits the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods''. The actions Google might take include disapproving or disabling ads and/or terminating advertisers. In the case of SEM agency, this pretty means the company might go bankrupt. This does not apply to Natural Search, which makes me wonder what happens to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies promoting fake goods web site. 


The most interesting part is related to trademark policy. Since last year, Google reviewed its trademark policy and now allows US advertisers to bid on branded keywords even though you might actually be a competitor to the brand being advertised. There was some controversy at the time since it was felt this was not a fair practice. More companies are going to bid for branded keywords. In Addition, if you bid on your competitor's name, your competitors might return the favor. This is bad business for advertisers. Ultimately it creates bidding war, and let's face it more media spent on Google. The only caveat was you can not use negative or pejorative terms to bid on branded keywords. This applies to the US only. Outside the US, it is still against Google principles to bid for branded keywords (unless this is your brand of course). 


To make a long story short, we declined the business opportunity on the basis of Google's fake goods principle but also trademark principle (the target market was the US). 


We lost a potentially very profitable business but feel good about our relationship with Google and more importantly about the company's integrity in general.