on 11 March 2010Marriott International doesn’t take kindly to Google, Yahoo and Bing selling the hoteliers trademarks as keywords to competitors and expects the search engines to change their practices.
Shafiq Khan, Marriott’s senior vice president e-commerce, says Marriott is “very concerned” about search engines selling Marriott keywords to others.
Speaking on a panel, “Hotel Executive Discussion,” at the TravelCom conference in Dallas, Khan said the practice “is a very significant issue. It is going to catch up with Google, with Yahoo with Bing.”
A Google search today for Renaissance Hotels & Resorts, a Marriott brand, turned up Expedia and Travelocity sponsored links, among others, with the word “hotels” in the text.
A Bing search today for Renaissance Hotels & Resorts produced sponsored ads from Expedia and Travelocity which were displayed higher than the Renaissance Hotels sponsored ad, like this:
And, a Yahoo search today for Renaissance Hotels & Resorts turned up an ad from Reserve Discount Hotels as the first sponsored result, like this:
Khan says Marriott is engaged in discussions with Google about its trademark-keyword practices and “we’ll be managing that with Google.”
He adds that expects Google will be a “smart company, a wise company” and will alter its practices.
The trademark issue has been a thorny one for years.
Carnival Cruise Lines recently banned its travel agency partners from using its trademarks as keywords in search engines.
Other companies have sued the search engines and otherwise pressured them to curb their practices.
In other matters, Khan says 2010 is “shaping up as a very good year,” although he adds, “I don’t think we will see 2007 again for quite some time.”
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I agree sites should not be allowed to bid on trademarks unless given direct permission.
However the above example Dennis is not exactly accurate. For example many companies use broad match for the term “hotels & resort” and a search for “Marriott hotels & resorts” will display those advertisers with broad matches for “hotels & resort”.
But if one does a search for just “Marriott” or just “renaissance” I could not see any competitor bidding in Google. ?
It’s pretty easy for Marriott or anyone else to protect their trademarks. For the brand name ‘oodles’ we have trademarks around the world. (noting we have a trademark in the US and oodle inc doesn’t! given their application was ruled “deceptively similar to oodles”) errr i digress..
So whenever a competitor had squatter on our brand name only (not broad match) we have contacted Google’s Advertising Legal Support Team, and the offending ad was quickly removed. But first we needed to register all our trademark numbers http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6118
• Trademark 5
• Trademark: oodles
• Country: United Kingdom
• Word/Design: Word
• Registered? Yes
• Application or Registration Number: 2391580