Well, it’s not entirely surprising after the similar “Mac” debacle, but I just got an email from Google AdWords saying that my PCalc advert has been suspended because it uses the trademarked term “iPhone” in the text. This isn’t about keywords it seems, it’s just the body text of the advert they complained about.
Here’s the ad:
PCalc for iPhone
Full-feature calculator with RPN.
Unit conversions, tape, hex/binary.
www.pcalc.com/iphone/
How exactly I’m supposed to advertise software for the iPhone without actually using the word “iPhone”, I’m not quite sure yet. When “Mac OS X” was banned, I switched to plain “OS X” and everybody seemed to be happy. Suggestions? “PCalc for that phone from that company named after a fruit”?
Yes, I know it’s probably something to do with protecting trademarks and having many many lawyers, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I mean, if my advert said “Don’t buy an iPhone, buy an HTC G1 instead!”, I could understand the concern from Apple’s perspective. But you’d think that since they get 30% of everything I sell, they would be quite happy I’m paying for the advertising myself.
Interesting that the email came today as the new versions came out – could be coincidence, but I’m guessing the increased traffic caught somebody’s attention.
And yeah, it might be a preemptive thing by Google’s many many lawyers too of course.
I had the same problem. You can contact Apple (ADC should have a POC for this) and ask them to give permission to use trademarked terms like “iPhone” and “iPod”, or even “Mac”. The Apple lawyers have a form e-mail exactly for this purpose, so they have obviously dealt with it before. If you’re a registered developer, you should not have a problem obtaining permission.
My gripe is that after I went to the trouble to get permission to use “iPhone”, a week later Google disapproved my use of “iPod”, and then a few weeks later, the use of “Mac” (all three words had formerly been in the same ad). Why they couldn’t scrub the ad and flag all three at once is beyond me, but I decided to pull my ad rather than bother Apple lawyers each time Google came up with a new reason to suspend the ad. Google needs to be a lot more efficient about this.
I later pulled the rest of my ads when I found out most of my keywords were no longer being used — I would have to bid more to keep them. Google adwords gets suckier by the month. I am glad to be done with them.
Yeah, somebody passed me the contact details of somebody in Apple Legal. I’ll report back when I hear anything…
I PLAN TO RUN SOME GOOGLE ADS FOR MY KATAKANA/HIRAGANA RELATED IPHONE APP ONCE IT GETS APPROVED. WOULD YOU BE HAPPY TO PRIVATELY PASS ON THE DETAILS OF THE PERSON IN APPLE LEGAL?
Did you make any progress with this? I was hoping you could share the contact you had so we can also try to accomplish the same thing. Thanks in advance!