Paul Smith's Blog

We were all surprised with Google's announcements that they're making their trademark policy more liberal and allowing everybody to bid on previously trademarked terms. This really goes against our idea of ethical business practice, something which the old rules used to enforce, and leaves the door open to brand bidding by any interested party. As brand building can be quite an expensive exercise (TV and radio ads, for example, don't come cheap), we rely heavily on the full returns of our investment - it is quite a tricky balancing act for us.So what does IWOOT do about all this? Well, as we run most of our PPC in-house, we have a direct control of what we do and do not bid on. We've created a special Competitors campaign in AdWords where we negative match our competitors names and URLs. H...