Here’s a question for Hercule Poirot perhaps. Did Scala purchase Wallflower? – not actually Wallflower Global, the New Zealand based Digital Signage software vendor that Damien Edmonds wrote about for us a while back but ‘wallflower’ the Google Adword.
The Google AdWords facility allows advertisers to purchase Keywords to drive the sponsored adverts that appear to the right of the search results.
It’s certainly not the case now if you use the Australian version of Google BUT we have it on very good authority that up until recently if you had Google’d ‘wallflower’ the sponsored links would have returned Scala!
Scala it seemed may well have purchased the keyword ‘Wallflower’ so that searches for that keyword in Australasia pop-up sponsored ads directing the visitor to the local Scala agent.
This practice is in contravention to Google’s Adwords Terms of Use of Adwords – you cannot use someone else’s Registered Trademark (i.e. Wallflower in this case) without the owner’s permission.
As we say it doesn’t happen now. The winner of course in all of this is Google – because Wallflower’s Australian Distributor has now had to purchase the Adword ‘Wallflower’ !
July 19th, 2009 at 23:45 @031
Chris,
please be advised that keywords used by google advertisers, in this case “wallflower” that are generic language or appear in the dictionary can be used without contravention to Google’s Adwords Terms of Use.
I find it very unlikley that the “australian” reseller of wallflower has “purchased” use of this keyword.
You also need to confirm that wallflower global has TM registered \”wallflower” , most unlikely!
Please get your facts straight.
Sam
July 21st, 2009 at 23:46 @031
Please be advised that the Google Legal Team have blocked the use of the Wallflower Adword by Scala or their agents.
Wallflower is a Registered Trademark of Wallflower Global and Google are very specific in stating that only Authorised users may benefit from this facility.
As a point of interest for ‘Sam’ he should perhaps consider that many other words he presumably considers ‘generic’ such as ‘Apple’, ‘Blackberry’, ‘Apricot’ are fiercely defended Trademarks in a similar fashion to Wallflower.