Facebook Supercedes Google Trademark Policy?

[AccuraCast]

We recently had Sitelink Extensions in our AdWords campaign disapproved for using the term "Facebook". When questioned about this, the Google rep wrote to us saying it was because we were not on their database of people authorised to use that term.

Why does the Facebook trademark get special attention, which other brands and trademark terms don't?

We've written a blog post (http://searchdailynews.blogspot.com/...s-special.html) with a much more detailed explaination about why this just seems wrong / unfair, but thought it might be useful to discuss out here too.

[AussieWebmaster]

could be restraints of EU - if they file copyright with G

[AccuraCast]

No. That's not it.

As of September 14, Google opened up bidding on trademarks and the inclusion of trademark terms within ad text in the UK, so long as certain quality guidelines were followed.

This is special treatment being offered only on the Facebook brand term, which other brand owners don't get.

[Discovery]

My Cynical side says this is payback to Facebook for jumping into the sack with Microsoft/Adcenter.

More likely, you just have to go through your account manager to work through the proper steps to clear the term in question.

Sometimes there is a combination between your broad match term, your negatives and or a dynamic insert that combines to create a phrase that "could" be a trademark or service mark.


We see TM warnings on some of our ads that are completely generic and have absolutely NO trademarked terms. I simply submit a support request or call my rep. A day later the warning is removed. Still a bit of a mystery why the warning is there in the first place, but again I assume it is a result of Google trying to serve up billions of ads in a world of complex rules for trademark and copyright infringement. Some things are just going to get flagged that really do seem innocuous.

[AccuraCast]

We actually got confirmation of this from our AdWords rep.

He said that while the term, ad and landing page meet the requirements for trademark bidding and usage in ad text, the 'Facebook' term is a special case and he wasn't quite sure himself why the standard trademark term usage requirements didn't apply here, but we couldn't use it in our ad sitelinks.