GoToMeeting uses competitor’s name in search ads to trick people | Hacker News Reader

GoToMeeting uses competitor’s name in search ads to trick people

thenextweb.com

12 pointsifficiency19 comments

There is a response from a marketing guy from GoToMeeting in the comments of this article. I couldn't readily find a way to link to the comment, so I'll post it here for anyone that doesn't want to go hunting:

"Hi, this is Andrew from the GoToMeeting search marketing team. I just posted over on the MeetingBurner blog as well. We do not use competitive names in search ads, but we do follow the common industry practice of bidding on competitive terms. In the instance of this ad, we were using a Google method called dynamic keyword insertion which delivers the searcher's query in the ad title. For example, if you were searching on the term "web conferencing," that query would appear in the ad title. In this case, the user entered "meeting burner" in the search field and it appeared in the ad title. This is why the Meeting Burner name showed up in the ad. Our search marketing efforts are never intended to deceive the searcher."

Edit: I couldn't find anything in the FAQ about this, but if a post like this is not really accurately representing a situation, is that something I should flag? I feel that is beyond simply "disagreeing with the post", but I don't want to start abusing the feature.

If they were bidding on the phrase "MeetingBurner" and set that up as a dynamic keyword, then yes, it would be automatically inserted into the title.

But that's still GoToMeeting's fault. The description is pretty straightforward in adword's support documentation:

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Key part:

"Since your ad text is dynamically updated with keywords from your account, make sure that all your keywords would make sense inserted in your ad text."

It should be obvious that if you use your competitor's brand name as a keyword, it'll get inserted like that.

Maybe they're just bad at using AdWords, I don't know.

Or maybe they're using a newfangled feature that's different from keyword insertion.

====

For more background info:

You have an AdGroup, which contains a set of Keywords and Ads.

The Ad is the part that has the text you see ("buy cheap stuff!!11one") and the target url, etc.

The keyword is the part you bid on "cars", "insurance", and includes the bid amount, and some other stuff.

Dynamic keyword insertion works by taking the keyword and inserting it into the ad text, so that you can set up ad groups like:

Ad: "Buy cheap {keyword:cars}" Keywords: "cars", "fast cars", "sports cars"

and you could automatically render ads, depending on the keyword used: "Buy cheap cars," "buy cheap fast cars", "buy cheap sports cars"

The point is that you still have to manually select what keywords to add in, which means they were keywording off of MeetingBurner, and should have been well aware that this would have happened.

Edit: added more info about AW structuring.

Here we go again. Instead of apologizing for thier mistake and removing the advertising they are hiding behind a google loophole to justify the use of our trademark. If they really did not intend to deceive the searcher than they should have never used our trademarked term to begin with.

Whether or not they are using dynamic keyword insertion is irrelevant.

Here is a comparison for consideration. I bid on "free credit report." The FTC isn't going to give a shit if I put "Free Credit Report" in my ad, or I bid on "free credit report" and used dynamic insertion. Its all the same thing, I now qualify for their draconian rule set for companies advertising to provide free credit reports. (By the way, do a search for "free credit report" on Google, notice anything special?)

Citrix placed the name of a federally trademarked business in their ad copy. Additionally, that trademark is for a direct competitors of theirs (not a fruit seller with an ad for an "Apple.") Thirdly, the promised product, Meetingburner, is not actually there. Thus, they are guilty of both trademark infringement and deceptive advertising.

At bare minimum, Meetingburner would send a C&D. At best they could demand a six figure settlement and a guarantee they will never bid on "Meetingburner" or run ads with "Meetingburner" in them again (killed two birds with one stone, since Citrix legally could bid on the term.) In the extreme they could refuse a settlement and take it to trial, and probably win. After legal expenses, likely a loss for both sides.

I've been on the receiving end of this before. I learned not to use dynamic insertion.

As for Adwords -- "Unfortunately, reaching out to the AdWords team at Google isn’t an easy task. This does appear to be against the Terms of Service for AdWords, but since its so close to the weekend, the ads might stay up for the next few days." -- Yeah, good luck with that. They let big advertisers do basically whatever the hell they want. I've watched very explicit rule violations slide for well in excess of a year.

Slight tangent, but I searched "free credit report" and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. What should I be taking note of?

One of the screenshots in the blog post shows an ad with a title saying "Meeting Burner" (with a space) with a "MeetingBurner" (no space) keyword. It isn't dynamic keyword insertion; it was an ad they wrote specifically for this keyword.

My first thought on these matters is usually "unscrupulous affiliate."

This is particularly so when the writer hasn't bothered to contact GoToMeeting first. The fast reward loop behind posting sensational and confrontational headlines unfortunately tends to outweigh the backlash from not doing basic research before publishing.

For that matter, it's possible that MeetingBurner took out the ads in attempt to generate press. There's no way to rationally conclude who the bad actor is, if there is one, because the writer didn't bother to do their research before holding their hand out for traffic.

"This is particularly so when the writer hasn't bothered to contact GoToMeeting first. The fast reward loop behind posting sensational and confrontational headlines unfortunately tends to outweigh the backlash from not doing basic research before publishing."

TNW have already established themselves as a scabby little rag that plagiarize and ignore Creative Common attribution requirements, not doing research sounds like par for the course.

I can promise you we did NOT take out the ads to generate press. You are entitled to your opinion but I can assure you this was not done by our team.

Not saying you did, just that the journalist has failed to meet minimum standards.

On the other hand, the problem could have been resolved with a phone call - from your lawyer, if necessary. Immediately making a blog post out of it on your end wasn't the most scrupulous thing to do either.

It also sounds like the problem arose from an innocent mistake on their end. Google doesn't warn against this when pushing their keyword insertion feature. It's on the user to be responsible, but Google could do a far better job on documentation.

I guessed it was dynamic keywords, and the comment by Andrew Taylor of GoToMeeting confirmed it:

"We do not use competitive names in search ads, but we do follow the common industry practice of bidding on competitive terms. In the instance of this ad, we were using a Google method called dynamic keyword insertion which delivers the searcher's query in the ad title."

IMO that's a very common practice: http://i.imgur.com/m1eDE.png (ebay store example) See the sponsored results by volusion, kabbge and ask.com

The difference is they are not positioning themselves as Ebay. In the MeetingBurner example they do not say "Considering MeetingBurner?" positioning us as a separate platform. Theres is MeetingBurner - Feature rich web meeting software with the underlying link to GTM.

Evil and illegal

Definitely evil and unethical but probably not illegal. This post shows some insight into the issue but not an answer http://www.sportsandentertainmentlawplaybook.com/intellectua...

Using another companies trademarked name in advertisements for your company without their permission is legal?

We are in the process of contacting Google now and protecting our trademark.

That post doesn't come anywhere close to establishing "probably not illegal." It's not 100% clear, but it sounds like Network Automation just bid on their competitors' product names to make their ad appear in searches for those products. That's aggressive, but like the court said, it's not particularly confusing unless you just genuinely can't tell the difference between the two products.

But actually using their product name in your ad as a link to your product page, the way GoToMeeting seems† to be doing here? That is very different. I think I would mistakenly click that link thinking I was going to MeetingBurner, and I am more ad-savvy than most Internet consumers.

† Note: I'm not actually going to accuse GoToMeeting of any wrongdoing here. Heaven knows I'd want people to wait for more than a TNW story before they indicted me. I'm just talking about the difference between the two instances.

Bidding on a trademark term, and including a trademark term in an ad to represent something that is not there are two distinctly different things.

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