Google Loosens Restrictions on Trademarks in Web Ads

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on May 15, 2009 - 6:00am.

Mountain View, Calif. - Google (NASD: GOOG) this week changed its policy on allowing trademarks to be used as keywords in the text of ads on its Web advertising platform.

Under certain criteria, the company said, advertisers will even be able to use trademark terms if they don't own the trademark or have explicit approval to use them.

"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," Google's Dan Friedman wrote in a blog post.

"However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell."

The company said that the change will help both users and advertisers "by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S."

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090515/tc_nm/us_google_2