Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I forgot to mention this in my last post about the dumb new Utah law against trademark keyword bidding, but I'm sure Senator Eastman didn't just wake up one morning and just decide to make this law. As is usually the case, it came from some kind of special interest group and/or lobbyist who has some kind of ulterior motive. From what I've been reading, Matthew Prince, CEO of Utah-based Unspam has something to do with it, although I haven't seen any clear indication of what his interest would be in pushing this law through. Matthew even did some guest posts on the Utah senate blog. The guy loses me when he starts arguing that Utah's laws need to be more like international laws instead of sticking with the nationwide trademark laws that we have in place. Also, the Pontiac story is a lame example, because no one in their right mind was confused by seeing a Mazda ad when searching on Pontiac. It's not like Mazda was pretending to be Pontiac. That's insane! Pontiac was stupid for doing that campaign like that anyway, why didn't they just direct consumers to Pontiac.com? I'm sure it was some kind of co-op deal with Google, but still, they brought it upon themselves by directing users to Google.

(note: I actually think this was one of the best moves Pontiac ever made in terms of their online marketing--I mean we're still talking about it and linking to them after all this time, now that's what I call a good ROI)

Labels: google, laws, pontiac, ppc, trademark

I'm surprised this hasn't shown up in the news before now, but apparently, the governor of my good state of Utah just signed a Utah law last month that makes it illegal for search advertisers to bid on their competitors' trademarked keywords. (here's the law) There are obviously two sides to the argument--most advertisers want to bid on their competitors' keywords while not allowing competitors to do the same to them--but that's not the point of this post. The point is, it is a complete waste of the legislature's time (and my tax dollars) to create this law. It's a pointless law that won't ever hold up--it's an issue that has been rehashed so many times and will continue to be for as long as the search engines offer keyword advertising. My personal feeling is that there should be no restrictions on trademark bidding at all, but the search engines actually have somewhat strict and I think very fair guidelines as to how advertisers can bid on trademarked terms. What's the point of having a law that's only valid in Utah to disallow trademark bids? It's a law to fix something that isn't broken! It's stupid! What a joke.

In fact, it's going to cause a lot more problems and cost the Utah tax payers a lot of money as they go through legal battles to try to defend their stupid law, which is very annoying. Besides being annoying, it's getting more than a little embarrassing how clueless our legislature is when it comes to enacting lame Internet laws...as pointed out by Eric Goldman.

Unfortunately, we're living up the reputation we have as clueless hicks here in Utah.

Oh, yeah, it was slashdotted and I'm sure will be all over the news (at least the news/blogs I read) by tomorrow.

Labels: duh, keywords, laws, ppc, trademark, utah