72 Kilowatts Internet Marketing

It’s not just Trademark Poaching

May 22nd, 2008 Posted in affiliate marketing, ethics in affiliate marketing

I’ve talked about this quite a bit over at Abestweb, but I wanted to note quickly here that we tend to use the term Trademark, especially in relation to poaching (i.e. bidding on the term when forbidden by the merchant) pretty loosely.

The real issue is bidding on merchant restricted keywords.

Since some merchants allow trademark bidding, and some don’t (in fact some allow it to select affiliates and not others), using the term Trademark Poaching is a misnomer in many cases. I think if we’re going to discuss this topic openly, such as we have at ABW, it’s important to use the correct terms, so that everyone is on the same page.

So as we often use it, I’d suggest Trademark Poaching really means: bidding on restricted key terms.

Tags: ethics, trademark poaching

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm and is filed under affiliate marketing, ethics in affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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BrandVerity 7 months ago 1 point
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Yeah, the use of the term 'trademark' in 'trademark poaching' implies trademark abuse. It just happens that trademarks are the most commonly restricted terms.

I've even seen examples where merchants are angered by trademark bidding, but they haven't disallowed those actions in their bidding.

Perhaps the proper term is 'Restricted Keyword Poaching' or maybe just 'Keyword Poaching'.

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Kevin Webster 7 months ago 1 point
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Often too, they call it Trademark bidding when in fact they haven't trademarked the terms, much less prohibited it in writing. That's actually a separate issue :)

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