A few days ago, Google informed users that it had changed the brand protection policy in contextual advertising of Google Ads (what used to be called AdWords).
In practice, this means that any advertiser can use any brand name with the same conditions as the owner of the brand.
Let's remember what this protection means:
Only brand owners can use it in the title or description in ads.
However, anyone can use it in the visible URL of the ad.
Anyone can use the brand name in their keywords.
For example, an ad for any hotel may appear when searching for the key phrase “Hotel Shalyapin”, if the advertiser paid for the keyword “shalyapin”.
When searching from English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, USA, UK, Ireland and New Zealand, the owner of the brand is not the only one who has the right to use its brand.
Google allows any distributor, reseller, or owner of an information site for the brand’s products to use it. Google calls such an advertiser a reseller.
What does this change mean?
When in practice there was no protection, the situation in the above-mentioned countries will not change,. We see this below as a result of a search made from the USA.
On the first page, along with the owner of the brand Hotel Liabeny, we see hotel aggregators that use the name of the hotel, that is, someone else's brand, in the ad header.
Google regarding resellers, the results would be different: If we did this search from Spain,
Only two paid advertisements are shown: one from the official website of the hotel, and the other from Booking.com (without specifying the name of the hotel in the headline or ad declaration, but instead it appears in a visible URL).
