Dentro de las marcas Marcas de Google Analytics, Investigación & Estrategia

1-800 V Contactos. Póngase en contacto con el rey del objetivo – Utilización de las marcas en la publicidad de palabras clave

1-800-Contacts, Inc., a Utah-based company with a history of keyword advertising litigation, filed a lawsuit in federal court on March 8th against its competitor Contact Lens King, Inc. for purchasing keywords based on its “1-800-Contacts” trademarks.  1-800-Contacts, the market leader in online and telephone distribution of contact lenses, has been involved in a number of lawsuits involving the use of trademarked terms in online advertising such as search ads.   

Just a few weeks ago, 1-800 Contacts sued Empire Vision of Syracuse, NY for the same reason.  1-800 Contacts was also the sponsor of legislation over the past few years in Utah to ban the practice of using other companies’ trademarked terms to trigger ads; even though the company itself purchased third party trademarks as keywords in the past.    

In the current case against Nevada-based Contact Lens King ("CLK"), 1-800 Contacts bases its allegations of trademark infringement on CLK's attempts to trade off and capitalize on the goodwill and high consumer recognition of the 1-800 Contacts trademarks.  Specifically, 1-800 Contacts claims that CLK purchased "1-800 Contacts" and other similar variants and misspellings of the trademark as keywords to trigger the display of sponsored advertisements for CLK's directly competitive products. 

Acknowledging some of the tools now currently offered by search engines to increase the relevance of search results, 1-800 Contacts also claims that CLK has not used the "negative keywords" tool offered by Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL to avoid triggering sponsored ads in response to consumers searches for trademarked terms such as 1-800 Contacts.  And that CLK "instead voluntarily and consciously participated in causing competitive advertisements to be displayed in response to consumers searching for 1-800 Contacts' marks" and products.     

1-800 Contacts also alleges that CLK's unauthorized use 1-800 Contacts' marks keywords in its Internet advertising campaigns, and CLK's sponsored ads which are displayed in response to searches for 1-800 Contacts has caused harm, and "initial interest confusion" as to the source or origin of CLK's products and that this is likely to falsely suggest some sponsorship, license or connnection by 1-800 Contacts with CLK's products.   

Dentro de las marcas ™ commentary:    

1. Keyword advertising using others' trademarked terms is good when we do it, but bad when others do it (especially with our trademarks).  Like many companies who use keyword advertising, 1-800 Contacts itself purchased others' trademarked terms as keywords in the past. Now it seeks to prevent others from doing so.    

2. Does failure to use a search engine's negative keyword tool mean that you are liable for trademark infringement, if sued by an owner of a mark that triggers ads to your competitive product?  If so, shouldn't the reverse be true - i.e. entry of a trademarked term into the negative keyword tool should prevent you from being found liable for a keyword-based trademark infringement claim made by the owner of such a mark.   

If this case doesn't settle, the court may actually have a chance to delve in and provide more clarity on this issue.    

Here's the complaint:    

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