Trademarked Terms in AdWords

Hello everybody:

Well I'm totally confused - after spending all week trying to get an AdWords campaign started, it keeps getting rejected.

The AdWords staff wrote me and explained that I am using a trademarked term both in the ad, and in the seach phrase.

I'm confused - if we want to sell subscriptions to the New York Times, and if I am an affiliate for the New York Times, I cannot mention them in my AdWords? I can't use "new york times" in my search phrase?

What is the difference between that and say using To Kill A Mockingbird as a search phrase or term in your ad? I just tested that term, and there is an ad running on that phrase, and it goes to senning the DVD's on half.com

So how do other affiliates with magazine/newspaper companies work with this?

Sincerely

Steve Labinski
Austin, TX

What's the word?

Wall Street Journal

Interesting. It seems that there are other people who are also affiliates for Wall Street Journal. One in particular stood out:

www.wsjnewspaper.com

So, perhaps the problem then has to do with the end content of the site. I have been rejected from Overture on several occasions for matching up words with sites that the editors didn't think had "relevant" content. It sounds like what you got was a form letter from Google.

Can you post the URL that you are trying to target to ADWords? Maybe that will shed some light on the issue.

I use product names in my adwords all of the time - and have pages optimized to rank for them. If that happened to me, I would resubmit a new - but just slightly different adgroup - a few days later. Maybe you will not trigger an algo or a get a different reviewer.

Hey everybody --

It crossed my mind this weekend about this trademarked term problem: Perhaps I should be putting "affiliate" or "aff" in my ad. I know people who link to amazon via their associate's id do that. It didn't occur to me to do that, since this I'm not using an Amazon affiliate program in this case.

I see the legal fear here is that the trademark owner does not want me to sell a product or run a website using their trademarked term.

Do you all use "affiliate" similarly? Any thoughts?

Thanks
Steve Labinski

I've read comments by others that Google even sends out emails asking that the advertiser identify him/herself as an affiliate, so I think you should try putting that in your ads and see what happens.

Gringo.