Google Eases Trademark Restrictions on Google AdWords Ads

May 17, 2009 - Google says it is relaxing the restrictions on the use of trademarked names in advertisements distributed using its ubiquitous Google AdWords product. The announcement appeared in a blog post on Google's official Inside AdWords blog earlier this week.

The new, relaxed policy takes effect for ads posted after May 15, 2009. The new ads will not begin appearing, according to the post, until June 15.

From the blog:

Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn't list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like "Buy discount cola" and "Snacks on sale." The ads wouldn't be useful since you wouldn't know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

That is why, in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google's policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard. Under certain criteria, you can use trademark terms in your ad text in the U.S. even if you don't own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it. This change will help you to create more narrowly targeted ad text that highlights your specific inventory.

For example, under our old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text. However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. We believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S.

Our guess is that this may lead, over time, to an upswing in AdSense CTR and CPM for publishers. Ads including trademarked names are, quite simply, more likely to be clicked by users due to name recognition. Yay, Google!

Here's a link to the full blog post.