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