Give Me Strength
Got accused today day of brand name bidding on the PPC search engines for a trademark term.
Bizarrely, the accuser was a huge global web portal that is pretty much a household name. Really, they should know better. Here’s how the phone call went:
Me: Hello, UK Offer
Global Web Giant: Hello, can you give me your email address as I have an email I want to send you because you are bidding on our trademarks on Google.
Me: Good afternoon to you too. Who is this and what exactly do you mean?
GWG: My name is xxxxxxx and I represent xxxxxxx; can you give me your email address?
Me: Why?
GWG: So I can send you an email as an official warning to stop bidding on our trademark.
Me: OK so what trademark is that then?
GWG: It’s xxxxxxx,xxxxxxx (not going to go into specifics here but its a brand name followed by a trademark so “Dixons Electronics” would be a good comparison).
Me: I’m sorry but you must be mistaken, I do not bid on that trademark but I do bid on that very generic word and as my bids are “Broadmatch” they will usually show up when other words such as your brand name are included in the search term. *I then give a lengthy explanation of how broadmatch works*.
GWG: Look, I just want your email address.
Me: Did you not hear me? I have just explained why my ads are showing up on Google.
GWG: I am not willing to discuss this further, you *are* bidding on our trademark so just give me your email address so I can send you this email.
Me: I’m sorry but I just gave you a perfectly reasonable explanation of why you *think* I am bidding on your trademark but you refused to listen. Was I not clear?
GWG: You are clearly guilty as you are not prepared to give me your email address.
Me: (after banging head off monitor) Well if you were clever enough to find my phone number on the contact us page of my site I’m sure you can work out that my email address is on that very same page. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sure enough an email comes through about 30 minutes later. Needless to say I binned it. I mean I’m sorry but if a company this big who has been online since day 1 can’t employ staff who know the basics then what hope is there?
What I’m listening to right now: K-Klass - “Rhythm is a Mystery”
Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 12:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
October 13th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Oh dear. Yet another case of crazy people contacting you. I think you’re brave having your phone number displayed on your site! I sometimes don’t even display email addresses anymore.