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Is your brand being hijacked?
17 June 2005

Brand hijacking seems to be taking place on the search engines and, having spoken to the victims, most are not even aware that it is happening. Some travel companies, including several tour operators, are making what seems to be blatant attempts to trade on their rivals' brands.

The practice is particularly prevalent on Google. Search for one tour operator's name and adverts will appear for another. Some operators appear to have set-up the display of their adverts to be triggered when users type-in keywords that are their competitors' company names.

Here are two examples: Type Peltours company name into Google and an advert appears Thomson Holidays, "Holidays Taba. Great deals to Taba. Book online and save up to GBP100. www.thomson.co.uk." Search for Libra Holidays and Olympic Holidays tops the column of adverts stating, "Olympic Holidays. Quality & Value Holidays & Flights to Greece & Cyprus. Book online now. www.olympicholidays.co.uk."

Now, I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure what the legal profession might say. I have no idea whether one tour operator could sue another for the potential loss of business. Apparently recent English case law suggests that it would not be passing off or breach of trademark. However, use of a competitor's name to trigger the display of adverts can only be detrimental to those companies whose brands are being hijacked.

According to Google's terms and conditions, they would prefer not to get involved " advertisers themselves are responsible for the keywords and ad content that they choose to use. Accordingly, we encourage trademark owners to resolve their disputes directly with the advertisers, particularly because the advertisers may have similar advertisements on other sites."

At first, this does not seem very helpful. However, Google does offer a Trademark Complaints Procedure. According to this, it " will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term from the ad content or keyword list and will prevent the advertiser from using the trademarked term in the future."

Interestingly, in January, in the French law courts, Google lost a lawsuit to Le Meridien. The hotel chain claimed that Google infringed its trademark by allowing competitors to use "Le Meridien" in combination with the words "hotel" or "resort" as keywords in the Google's Adwords advertising programme. Google is planning to appeal.

Just to be clear, I see no problem with travel agents using tour operators' brand names to promote themselves. They have commercial agreements with tour operators to sell their holidays and thus are no different to any retailer promoting the sale of the branded goods they stock. My concern is that tour operators are using a direct competitor's name to trigger its own.

I certainly found more incidences of this apparent brand hijacking than I have mentioned here. My advice is to conduct searches for your company name on the more popular pay per click search engines such as Google and Overture. Try these at different times of the day to uncover all the instances of your brand being hijacked. If you think a competitor has targeted your brand, rather than getting involved in a lawsuit, much better to ask Google or any other search engine to prohibit the advertisers you have identified from using your brand/company name.

But the question I ask myself is why are tour operators so desperate that they need to resort to these tactics? Are profits so hard to come by or are other industries that refrain from this practice simply being naive in not making a fast buck at a competitor's expense?
 

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