What does this mean in practice? For the last few years, Google has had a Europe-wide policy which enabled trademark owners to restrict the use of their trademark by others in the Adwords programme. However, Google has steadfastly avoided implementing this in the US and where any case has been brought against them - they’ve generally settled out of court.

Google didn’t offer a registration system in Europe out of the kindness of its heart or through respect for the different European cultures; it was prompted through a number of legal cases - notably in France - where Google was fined for trademark infringement.

So let’s just look at what Google is saying now. A UK or Irish company that invests in products offering a certain value represented by a name or brand and registered as a trademark - such as ‘webcertain’ (registered as a trademark throughout Europe) - find that people search for ‘webcertain’ in Google. It’s a route to find the supplier which offers a known service or product. Until this week, it was not possible for competitors to use this trademark to promote themselves either in the trigger keywords or in the creative.

From now a competitor offering copycat products can use that registered trademark in its keyword bidding - just not in the creative. It’s a complex area and ‘webcertain’ is relatively straightforward and specific - not all trademarks are single word specific words such as this. However, is it right that people searching for ‘webcertain’ are diverted to alternate suppliers. Coca Cola would not accept customers requesting Coca Cola being offered Pepsi Cola. Disney would not accept customers looking for it being sent to some other cartoon producer.

What this also means is that if I bid on my trademark - the price I have to pay per click will be elevated by anyone being allowed to compete to appear on the screen. So as the trademark owner - I will have to pay MORE to bid on my own trademark.

Behind the decision is the idea that Google cannot be held responsible for policing other people’s trademarks. In their statement, they say “Our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and
Ireland.” Google is trying to say, “We won’t investigate this any more - it’s not our fault.”

The majority of cases I have been involved with concerned advertisers inadvertently bidding on their competitors because Google placed the sponsored links on the trademark term via its ‘broad match’ system for broadcasting sponsored links against a wider set of terms than the advertiser originally specified.

More worrying is the fact that Google has made this change in policy for the UK and Ireland as a separate step before doing so for the whole of Europe. Why? The law in Europe - particularly in this area - is largely developed at European level by European Directives and then implemented by national parliaments. The only possible reasons are that Google thinks that legislation in the UK is different or the response would be softer than in continental Europe. Either way, Google is saying “The UK is a softer touch”. In fact, there is very little difference between the legislation in European countries thanks to the European Union.

What’s the consequence? Bizarrely, the very advertisers most targeted by Google for development - the blue chip corporate organisations with large advertising budgets - will be the most affected as they hold the greatest number of trademarks. They will now have to invest more in their search budgets to stay where they are now. The intellectual property lawyers will have a very busy time and IP costs will increase for budgets dramatically - and it is highly likely there will be high profile cases against Google because their broad match system - once the lawyers understand that fully that is. And Google will see if it can get away with it in the UK before expanding to the continent. If Google, the most successful global search engine succeeds, there may no longer be anything for trademark owners to protect and intellectual property won’t be the ‘property’ of anyone. Is that good for the consumer?

THE ANNOUNCEMENT:-

Hello,

We’re writing to inform you that we’re changing our trademark complaint
procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how we handle the
trademark complaint you currently have on file with Google.

If you’ve submitted a complaint letter requesting that we prevent
advertisers from using certain trademark terms anywhere in their ad text, we
will continue our efforts to support your request. However, from May 5,
2008, our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google
monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and
Ireland. This will bring our procedure in line with the approach taken in
the US and Canada. Complaints received on or after today will be processed
under our revised procedure.

You do not need to file your trademark complaint with us again unless you
would like to amend it based on the new guidelines. For more detailed
information regarding our trademark complaint procedure, we invite you to
review our revised complaint procedure, posted online at
http://www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html.

To learn more about this trademark policy revision, please visit
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

Advertising Legal Support Team

The survey was conducted on a sample of 22.000 consumers in:

• France
• Germany
• Holland
• Italy
• Spain
• Sweden
• UK

Three years after the launch of IM mobile operators appear less than enthusiastic about this technology, fearing cannibalization of profits deriving from text messaging services (SMS), however the growth of IM is seen as “inevitable”

Niek van Veen, analyst di Forrester Research identifies IM as a means to differentiate mobile operators services and improve user experience.

All this will have a significant impact on web and search technology as mobile devices become an integral part of work and leisure.

Source: Spot and Web - N.15

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

According to reports, the woman was buying the names to sell on to other parties at higher prices - nothing new in that then. EURid says that is has received complaints - not particularly new either. One key point is that only European-based organisations are allowed to hold .EU domain names.

Out-law carries this great quote from EURid, “When we screen our data bank we see that some people have an amazing amount of names. Nobody needs 10,000 names.” Strange. You’d have thought that EURid had a little more knowledge and insight about the industry in which they operate. Perhaps that’s why there were so many complaints at launch!

The companies concerned include Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and US firm Cingular. Combined, they have a user base of 600 million people - with some 20% in the UK expected to have broadband speed mobile phone access by the end of 2007.

According to The Telegraph, declining mobile phone revenues are forcing telecoms operators to look at all angles - and the lucrative search advertising market is clearly attractive. For telecoms operators it is very appealing to keep a larger percentage of the revenues rather than ’sharing’ with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

However, both Google and Yahoo have already done deals with mobile phone operators and it is not clear what impact this will have!

Whilst for web marketing campaigns, 12% isn’t a huge number it still cannot be ignored. Which retailer would willing stop 12% of its customers from walking through the done - none! Added to that, the figures show that Firefox users see 24.4 pages per person per month - compared with just 19.1 pages for Internet Explorer - a difference which reduces the Internet Explorer advantage.

The study was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. while 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, only 19% of US users were accessing the web via their mobile devices.

The highest mobile Web penetration was in Germany, Italy and the UK (at 34% each), followed by France and Spain, and the US.

Hitwise has also launched a new data center facility which gives a variety of information including search engine share. In September this was:

Google.co.uk 66%

Google.com 12%

Yahoo 6%

MSN 6%

Which all in all means that Google continues to lead the way with the ‘American’ site beating the UK sites of its two main competitors.

Guy says, “Search is the perfect form of persuasion marketing and is rapidly becoming the largest slice of the pie in the UK - it is already bigger than outdoor.”

The finding comes in their annual study of online market share carried out with Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the World Advertising Research Centre.

A YouGov finding also says that UK web users now spend 23 hours per week online - somewhat of an underestimate in my case!

The 8 countries are:-

In 2008 it is estimated that 17.2% of marketing spend in the UK will dedicated to online and online will be ahead of cinema and outdoor forms of advertising and not far behind radio. Smaller advertisers in particular are to benefit from the affordability and targeting capabilities of the internet (which means ’search’ to you and me!!)

Internet advertising expenditure is to rise globally by 84% between 2005 and 2008.

Jeff pointed to the fact that there are twice as many Chinese speakers in the world as English - not all the world speaks English.  And there are great information resources in Chinese and Arabic, he said.

If Jeff mentions this in public during this kind of conference, it can only be assumed that something more is coming from Google in terms of translation tools - so watch this space or international roll out.

The three speakers, Stephen Taylor from Yahoo and Chris Ward from MSN were also on the panel, all agreed that social search and personalisation are important themes for the future - the importance of the marketer in the process was also particularly noted.

The report identifies the UK as the most “mature” of all European markets, outspending european and even american counterparts on an annual per capita basis.

The study shows Spain and France as the fastest growing internet user populations, while Germany and Italy lead in broadband uptake.

The article identifies other markets such as Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway having active online consumers, forecasting Poland and other Eastern European as “serious online retail marketplaces in their own right”.

The results presented have raised some questions, however the trend is there for all to see.

Read/Write Web provides information on users behaviour and top web 2.0 applications for the following countries:

• Germany
• Korea
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Russia
• UK

As far as the delaying factor is concerned, this could be due to companies, such as The Carphone Warehouse, not being able to deliver on requests for free lines - together with a new ‘confusion’ in the market place.

Nevertheless, seems like a lot of broadband to me with towns typically having 50% broadband access.

The project will develop along several lines:

• A systematic and rigorous data collection campaign that will produce reference datasets and make them available to the scientific community at large.
• The design and implementation of innovative techniques and tools for the analysis and mining of data.
• The construction and validation of modeling schemes for the observed phenomenology, involving the comparison of experimental data, simulation and theoretical constructions.
• The design and deployment of innovative, proof-of-concept tools aimed at better structuring and navigating information.

The kick off meeting was held on July 14th. The evolution of the project can be followed via the blog.

Q4, 2005 - The Top ten countries in Wetern Europe ranked Digital Content Consumption :
UK - 30.5
Finland - 23.1
Italy - 21.1
Sweden - 20.0
France - 19.1
Netherlands - 18.5
Ireland - 17.4
Swiss - 17.4
Denmark - 16.6
Norway - 15.7