adCenter trademarks no longer protected on keywords

Posted by Josh on Tuesday, February 15th, 2011.

Microsoft has announced that as of March 3, 2011 they will no longer review keywords for trademarks. This comes almost a year to the day after we explained why limiting keyword usage is unfair to advertisers and inconsistent with most other interpretations of trademark protection. It also makes trademark usage roughly consistent between Bing, Yahoo, and Google.

This policy change means that you will be able to advertise on trademarked keywords, though you will still not be able to use the trademarked terms in ad language without permission from the trademark owner. For instance, Pepsi will be able to target “coke” as a keyword but still cannot use “Coke” or “Coca-cola” in their ads.