John Lewis

30-05-03

"Please note the following new policy that is going into effect for all johnlewis.com affiliates. Failure to comply may result in your johnlewis.com affiliation being ended.

An Affiliate may use the word mark 'johnlewis.com' in site content and in creative supplied by johnlewis.com through TradeDoubler. They may not bid on or use the word mark ' johnlewis.com' or 'John Lewis' in any way to gain preferential listings on Search Engines, Directories or any other kind of online database."

OK fine you can't bid on John Lewis etc.. but you cant use it on your site as well ??

Havent we been down this road before with other merchants ?

30-05-03

Am I the only person that believes that these merchants are taking the p1ss?.

Do John Lewis advertise Sony televisions or Bosch fridges...of course they do. Do Sony forbid them from using the trademark "Sony", obviously not. Can somebody please explain the difference.

How are we (the web experts

) expected to pre-sell on the web when we are not allowed to use the merchants name. Surely, if a merchant launches an affiliate scheme he's appointing us as an agent. Tell me any other agent that is not allowed to use the name of the company that he's acting as agent for.

30-05-03

Exactly, I can understand bidding on PPC but on free listings
is ridiculious.

Look at it this way would they prefer their brand in the free listings was taken by affiliates or competitors? Because thats whats going to happen and then they cant do anything about it.

Maybe they could complain to google about everylisting they dont like and suddenly google will get annoyed and take their domain out totally.. after all it is a private company and no one has a right to be in any position.

30-05-03

I just found my email and was going to post too, but you'd beaten me to it.

Whats a word mark? Like a trademark?
"word mark 'johnlewis.com' in site content"

Doesn't google already only bring up their site if you type johnlewis.com in?

30-05-03

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>An Affiliate may use the word mark 'johnlewis.com' in site content and in creative supplied by johnlewis.com through TradeDoubler. They may not bid on or use the word mark ' johnlewis.com' or 'John Lewis' in any way to gain preferential listings on Search Engines, Directories or any other kind of online database."[/quote]

I'm reading this as saying that you can use johnlewis.com in site content but you cannot bid on the domain name in PPC engines.

Of course it may well mean that they don't understand seo very well and aren't aware that putting johnlewis.com in your content will help your search engine listings for that term.

Either way I think the point of the email was to prevent people bidding on those terms rather than including them in content.