Is ‘piggybacking’ jeopardizing your brand?

Referring back to Riccardo’s article on Google’s trademark policy, this is now becoming a very serious issue that has started to be brought into trial. The problem lies in that small advertisers have been using the tactic known as ‘piggybacking’ where they insert BIG advertiser brand names, and slogans into text ads in order to attract users’ attention. Big no-no. Again, this reminds me of one of our past articles which discussed a little bit on the whole Google URL ordeal, well, this seems to be another predominant issue that’s been stirring things up lately.

To give you a clear example, if you’re the owner of, say, a travel agency, and place an ad on Google where your headline reads, “Cheap Flights to Mykonos on Alitalia,” which eventually links to your agency’s website, and not that of Alitalia, this is where the problem resides. What happens next is that Alitalia complains to, Google, why? cause they own 71.2% (last year’s statistics) of the search market and unfortunately needs to respond to numerous upset industry players. However, bear in mind, both Microsoft and Yahoo! are also main players in the search industry, which happen to comprise similar policies to that of Google.

In the meantime, we see Google diligently capturing more and more advertisers to invest on display and video ads, however, this may well begin declining unless it shows it can actively react to irritating issues that have definitely gotten under the skin of big honchos such as InterContinental Hotels and American Airlines. ‘If Google has an inability to help us resolve issues about abuses of our brand, that would impact our decision to participate in future forms of advertising,” says John Gustafson, director of distribution and Internet strategy at Northwest Airlines.

Unfortunately, some top brand names such as American Airlines, invest half their revenue on online advertising to generate sales, so conflicts such as these can clearly jeopardize and induce unwanted spending. The solution would be to strictly reinforce the trademark policy and allow only those with permission to use companies’ names and slogans in the text of online search ads.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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