More Evidence That Competitive Keyword Advertising Benefits Trademark Owners (Forbes Cross-Post)
27 08 2013By Eric Goldman
Many trademark owners hate that rivals can bid on Google AdWords ads triggered by their trademarks, a process I call “competitive keyword advertising.” Trademark owners (and many judges) often assume that a Google search on a trademark means the searcher must be looking for the trademark owner’s goods or services; in which case any competitive advertising on that search term is trying to “steal” the trademark owner’s customer. However, as I’ve previously blogged, this assumption is false because searchers routinely use trademarks as a “proxy” for its class of goods. In this post, I’ll discuss a new empirical study that provides more evidence that competitive keyword advertising doesn’t harm trademark owners and may, in fact, benefit them.
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