Google changes AdWords policy to allow trade marks in text of US adverts

Google will allow companies to use other people's trade marks in search engine adverts without their owner's permission for the first time, it has said. Use has previously been restricted to the use of trade marked terms as triggers for the ads.

Google has said companies which sell branded goods will be able to name those brands in their adverts on Google, even if the brands are trade marks and the consent of the trade mark owner has not been received. The change will only apply in the US.

Google's AdWords is a keyword advertising system by which companies bid for the right to have their text ads displayed alongside the search results for certain keywords.

Google has long allowed US companies to pay to use other people's trade marks as keywords, so that their ads will be displayed beside the search results of another person's trade mark. It previously said, though, that companies are not allowed to use the trade marked term in the actual adverts.

That has now changed in the US, according to an announcement by Google AdWords employee Dan Friedman.

"Under certain criteria, you can use trademark terms in your ad text in the US even if you don't own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it," said Friedman on a Google blog. "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 US," he said.

Google has recently been liberalising its trade mark policies in relation to AdWords. Earlier this month it expanded from four to 194 the number of countries in which it would not stop AdWords advertisers from using other people's trade marks as keywords. Last year it had expanded that policy from the US and Canada to the UK and Ireland.