I received an email today from one of the affiliate managers I work with letting me know that they’ve received complaints about our site infringing on a few companies’ brands. What was it that we were doing so wrong? Making false claims? Bidding on their brand terms? Inaccurately portraying the brand? The answer: none of these.
What’s even worse is that these aren’t companies’ competing against the company I’m an affiliate of, they are companies that offer products through the company I’m partnered with. I’m trying to market their own products and bring them new customers, but they don’t want us to mention their name or use their logo on our site. The information in question provides background on the company, has their logo and has a call to action - all being used to provide the user with extra information and to market their products. There are several companies in this particular industry, many of whom we have no relationship whatsoever with. On the site, we also provide information about the companies we don’t have a relationship with so that, just like for the companies we do market, our users can get a overall picture of what’s out there.
I realize that since there is a partnership, that they can make rules within the agreement saying we can’t use any of their trademarks on the site. That’s not the issue I have. The issue to me is… why would you really want to? Basically, what these companies are saying to us is that they’d prefer us to not say anything about them on our site, but still try to get our users to become their customers. First, why would a user want to go and do business with a company when they’re not told who that company is. Secondly, why would a company want to remove information that can be helpful to generating a sale? To me, this is like trying to sell a Pioneer TV to someone without mentioning the words Pioneer or having any photos of it displayed, while at the same time, the rest of your site has information about Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, etc. How easy do you think it’d be to sell that Pioneer?
What does all of this result in? Well, I’ll first be working with my AM to try to enlighten these companies as to how asinine their legal teams are in the hopes that they’ll allow us to leave our pages on the site the way they are or make any needed changes instead of just completely taking them down. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go ahead and make a new site (for a different affiliate program) using those pages not allowed on the current site that I’m using to promote these companies, but will be marketing their competitors instead. I’ll have the information about these companies, as it’s perfectly legal* to have, but when the user is ready to buy the product I’m promoting, I’ll be informing them of all the benefits that their competitors can provide if they buy that same product through them instead. I won’t be doing it in any deceptive way, but rather the same way other companies are marketing products.
In the end, the only companies who are losing out are the ones trying to keep my hands tied by having ludicrous restrictions.
* since this post talks about law, I should probably note that while the link I provided is to a site maintained by a lawyer, I personally am not a lawyer but have seen that coke, pepsi, apple, burger king, etc. etc. all use competitor trademarks in their commercials and I’m positive their competitors aren’t saying, “sure, go ahead and tell people you’re better than us.” I also make no claims of the validity of anything that is written here and none of this should be taken as legal advice or guidance. Your results may vary.. some restrictions may apply.. pricing and participation may vary.. not available in all states.. professional driver closed course..blah blah..
Related posts
