Policy on bidding for peoples names

[DavidThulin]

Hi!

If a company was to benchmark a group of people - for example all political candidates prior to an election - and compare their views on for example the environment, and then publish this report ranking the political candidates in respect to their views on environmental policy, would I be allowed to purchase traffic through AdWords using candidate names as keywords?

I guess the question would be if the ranking "speaks ill" of the person who ended up last in the ranking or not.

Ideas? Thoughts?

Thanks,

David

[bhartzer]

You can bid on any keyword you want, even names of companies and people's names and trademarks. However, your ad copy and your web site cannot and should not include the names of companies, people's names, or trademarks.

[DavidThulin]

Ah, that makes sense. Ill try that, thanks.

/David

[Chris_D]

I just noticed that David is from Sweden - some of the Adwords policies are different outside the USA.

Leaving aside any legal issues - and just looking at this from a pure Adwords trademark perspective, the key areas to look at are:

AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure – Trademark rights in US and Canada

When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we only investigate the use of the trademark in ad text. If the advertiser is using the trademark in ad text, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in ad text in the future. Please note that we will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint.

AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure – Trademark rights outside US and Canada

When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, our review is limited to ensuring that the advertisements at issue are not using a term corresponding to the trademarked term in the ad text or as a keyword trigger. If they are, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term from the ad text or keyword list and will prevent the advertiser from using the trademarked term in the future.

http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html Note - My bold.

So - if a trademark owner has advised Google of their trademark - and you are outside of US/ Canada - you (if you are not the trademark owner) can't buy the trademark as an adwords trigger phrase/ keyword.

Whereas in the US/ Canada you can.

But as bhartzer said - you can't use a trademark in the Adwords Ad (if the trademark owner has advised Google of the trademark).