New WatchMouse Product Detects Online Brand Abuse

Following on the heels of a highly visible court case between Louis Vuitton and Google, WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring, today announced the new product launch of GeoBrand, an automated way to detect brand abuse in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Yahoo!, Bing and Google in over 30 countries. WatchMouse tested GeoBrand using Interbrand’s “2009 Best Global Brands” list, and determined that 81 percent of the top 100 global brands are victims of search engine advertising brand abuse including BMW, IBM, Cartier, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and L’Oréal.

“Unauthorized use of third-party trademarks and brand names as keywords to trigger keyword advertising and sponsored links is a rampant problem. We discovered through our testing that one of the sectors with the most widespread and blatant brand abuse is the automobile industry”

Search engine advertising programs offered by Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search, Google’s AdWords, and Microsoft Bing’s Search Advertising service allow any business to purchase keywords to display web advertisements on the search engine results page.

“Unauthorized use of third-party trademarks and brand names as keywords to trigger keyword advertising and sponsored links is a rampant problem. We discovered through our testing that one of the sectors with the most widespread and blatant brand abuse is the automobile industry,” states Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. “Business is siphoned or lost when consumers visit a competitor’s website via a competitor’s keyword ad rather than accessing the brand owner’s website.”

The recent European court case involving Louis Vuitton and Google ruled that companies who use brand names in search advertising to drive sales must be more transparent about who the seller is. The court’s decision however, left the challenge of tracking and handling this type of brand abuse with brand owners.

Each of the major search engines has different policies that vary by country. The challenge for brand managers is to remain abreast of the rules and to monitor and track abuse globally.

“It’s very challenging to detect when and where a brand is being exploited via online advertising because search engine results vary greatly depending on the user’s actual location by country. GeoBrand is the only monitoring solution capable of detecting the unique PPC ads for each country’s search engines,” adds Pors.

GeoBrand performs actual tests and detects PPC ads in 30 major countries and generates reports of the offenses by country and specific search engine. This provides brand managers with the documentation they need to correctly manage search engine complaint procedures, overbid competition, and if necessary, to take legal action.

The GeoBrand Solution offers:

• Actual tests in 30 major countries
• Smart filtering technology delivers the most relevant brand abuse cases
• A clean, web-based console for easy management and reporting
• A way to proactively monitor and manage all brands and trademarks on the Web
• Easily accessible, brand and trademark abuse reports

GeoBrand is currently available for members of INTA (International Trademark Association), professional legal service providers and dedicated brand managers only. For more information visit www.geo-brand.com.

Logos, product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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