The tank also appears in the June 2010 issue of Playboy magazine, being worn by super-hottie and Playmate of the Year, Hope Dworaczyk (she also wears the “Fangbanger” apparel in the same story and says if she were a shape shifter she would obviously shift into a “bunny” – hah hah ha).

The “V I L F” tank sells for $19.99 at the HBO online store. Other fan gear is available with phrases like “Real Blood is for Suckers.” Mugs can be had with “welcome to Bon Temps,” and “Fangtasia” pint glasses. The usual cheesy “I Love Sookie” T-shirts, and junk with the images of the cast.

I tried the bottled “true blood” soda, but didn’t particularly care for it. A bit too syrupy and too many ingredients to be good for any long term substitute for the “real thing.” If you want to really mess with people at your next PTA meeting, the “American Vampire League” T-shirt might be a good choice.

HBO has also posted a preview trailer teaser for True Blood Season 3. The show is awesome, and the vampire craze shows no sign of waning anytime soon.

You can see the VILF tank here:
http://store.hbo.com/detail.php?p=262694&v=hbo_shows_true-blood .

Promo video follows:

If you look on YouTube there is all kinds of “Mandura” marketing crap, and funnily enough they’re using “scam” videos to try to get you to look at whether it’s a scam, but then try to convince you to get on board the fruit juice gold digger train. (Really?) What’s funny, too, is if you type in “mandura juice scam” in Google the first five pages of results are all about the supposed scam, where the MLM folks are making up pages of junk sites content to get you to go there to find out if it’s a scam. Junk PR sites, junk article sites, etc. — but don’t be fooled. And if you want to get involved with law breakers, then you get what you deserve.

Basically, if you’ve seen all the spam for Mangosteen juice, for Acai Berry, and related junk, this is the latest thing.

The 501-691-3245 phone number has been reported to the FTC for violating my privacy rights, and my phone number being on the national do not call list. Also sent a note off to the California state attorneys general office about the violation of both the robocalling law and privacy law violations on “Chris Hogan’s” various sites. He “appears” to be in Arkansas. I’ll have to look up the State AG in Arkansas to file complaint.

TO REPORT A ROBOCALLER TO THE FTC for calling your home number on the do-not-call registry, go here:
https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx?panel=2 .

The site being pushed in the robo-call is “StormofWealth(.com)” which redirects to “StormofWealth(.net)” – as in “storm of wealth.” Suuuuuuure. Want to buy this bridge I have out back? It’s a keeper, and you can make internet millions and all the honeys will love you with that big bridge in your back yard. Aw, c’mon, it’s a multi-level bridge. Double decker, even.

What cracks me up is using this tagline on one of the sites, “presented by Rev. Chris & Angelique Hogan” ((chogan.mandurarep(.com))… as if being a Reverend means anything good in the world of questionable MLM. When you break the law, being a “Rev” doesn’t mean God absolves you of your evil doing, brother, and accept this gilt edged invitation to hell. Or, H E double hockey sticks, pal.

Here is the WHOIS record for “StormofWealth(.net)”:

Registration Service Provided By: 1COMS .COM
Contact: +44.7773590344

Status:ACTIVE.

The server seems to land at a Mumbai, India hosting company, mydosty(.com), with an IP of 75.127.68.101. What’s funny is if you type in the IP for hostluck(.com), listed as the name servers, it comes up with an “this account has been suspended” message. So, you can see there is a bit of jiggery pokery going on behind the scenes with the companies hosting these sites. And, of course, since it’s in India, we can’t really complain about the site owner (Mr/Mrs Hogan) violating US/California laws. They don’t care. Thank you India for making robo-calling such a money maker for your companies and fracking off so many US citizens.

The Storm of Wealth site appears to be living as a shared IP at 75.127.68.98. For those of you wanting to block the IP range in your firewall(s), you can likely block the 75.127.68.1/24 IP range and be happy keeping the scum out of your mailbox, too.

As always, worth noting that the mandura rep site is in violation of various privacy laws including California’s privacy law. The ManduraRep site seems to be an MLM powered by the upstream www.mlmteamsites(.com). With “MLM” in the domain name, you know it’s “gotta be good.” And that site seems to be owned by MLMpublicity(.com) is a division of TenBrink International (a one man company, apparently, aka “Ryan Tenbrink” in Carrolton, TX; one BBB complaint).

So, Rev. Chris Hogan, thank jesus as today you are this week’s award winner for official robo-calling scum of the week. Congratulations.

In going to the website being promoted by the illicit robo-caller, we find (big surprise) what looks to be a come-on to make money using a “secret marketing breakthrough!” The site proclaims they have “discovered a secret so powerful it literally ‘POURS’ Cash Directly Into Your Pocket Automatically!!” (capitalized words and double exclamation points from the site).

Besides the fact the site is collecting name, email and phone information (personal information), and does not display a legally required or California law compliant privacy statement, it claims there is “no MLM or Network Marketing.”

From the looks of it, I might suspect it’s one of the wide ranging “cash gifting” scams going around, and which have been widely covered on the TV news here in California.

Since there is only a one-page site (a sure sign of a money making scam, for anybody who has seen these before), the HTML title tag shows “Ez1up Cash System” and the sign-up form is being loaded from aweber(.com), a site offering “email marketing campaign” services, auto-responders, and other bric-a-brac often used by evil-doers on the Web.

I sent a query off to “AWber Communications” which claims to be in Huntingdon Valley, PA, informing of the mis-use of their services. We’ll see if we get a reply.

In looking up what info we could on the domain, the registrant appears to be somebody called “Bo Small” in New York, based on the domain record:

Whois Record Search

Registrant Search:”Bo Small” owns about 58 other domains Email Search: is associated with about 106 domains

Registrar History:1 registrar with 1 drop. NS History:8 changes on 6 unique name servers over 4 years. IP History:4 changes on 3 unique name servers over 4 years. Whois History:6 records have been archived since 2009-12-29 .

Registrant:
Bo Small
300 W St
Buffalo, New York 14201
United States

Domain Name: TURBOATM .COM
Created on: 28-Dec-09
Expires on: 28-Dec-10
Last Updated on: 28-Dec-09

The domain servers, seem to be (apparently owned by GoDaddy)
NS27.DOMAINCONTROL .COM
NS28.DOMAINCONTROL .COM

The reverse domain lookup seems to lead to the IP 64.202.189.170, which is owned by GoDaddy (*to clarify: it means GoDaddy hosts the site for the believed scammers/robo-caller, it does NOT mean GoDaddy has anything to do with the site! GoDaddy is a good company.). Complaints can be sent to the hosting provider, which is GoDaddy at: abuse@godaddy.com.

An entry has been made at “whocalled.us” for the offending originating phone number where the calls originated (http://whocalled.us/lookup/2063509029).

Remember – it’s against the law to call phone numbers on the national “do not call” registry. Robo-calling is against the law in certain locales, like California. Companies that robo-call any of our staff, family, employees, or companies will be glorified with this dubious award of distinction.

So, congratulations “TurboATM-COM” – you’re this week’s winner of the scumbag robocaller of the week award.

Next week we apparently have some signage show in Vegas calling with free pass info. Hooo boy. Lookout! More robo-calling scum to feature. Stay tuned, party people.

An article from A.P. in BusinessWeek (among other places, http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9DGTGVG3.htm ), points to a story titled “Blue Cross agrees to pay $95K on illegal robocalls.” According to the story from Jan. 28, 2010, “North Carolina’s largest health insurer agreed to pay $95,000 to resolve a dispute with the state over 100,000 ‘robocalls’ pushing the company’s views on the national health care debate, officials for the state and the company said Thursday.”

So, looks like California will need to hunt them down next. Evil evil evil. Basically these companies should learn that nobody will do business with a “robocaller,” whether it’s pushing a political agenda, promoting a scumbag local business offering chiropractic services (I got about 100 of those last year before the new law took hold), or from any international company promoting lower insurance rates, or credit card refinancing (yeah, like I’m going to do business with a middle east company asking for my credit card and personal info).

I won’t vote for ANY political campaign that robo-calls me, and will never do business with any company doing robo-dialing. Frack you Blue Cross, and the horse your CEO rode in on.

According to the AP story, “Blue Cross spokesman Lew Borman said the company on Wednesday paid the $95,000 penalty, which will go to the public schools, according to the settlement. The agreement also requires the company to create written guidelines for its employees and vendors to ensure they comply with the robocall rules.”

Hey, did you know we have laws in California governing your crappy marketing? Check out this PDF on the cpuc.ca.gov website: http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/51D7DD5B-9902-4C3B-9EB3-B75F56CBB4C2/0/080129_RobocallADAD_FAQ.pdf .

According to the above document:
When can robocalls (ADADs) be used? What companies or agencies can use them?
Robocalls are only legal when introduced by a live person unless:
1) You are a member or a client of a company or organization that uses them to deliver messages (such as an announcement about a sale) or; 2) The police, fire or emergency service agency uses them to contact you about an emergency.

According tor the CPUC:
What can I do if I receive a robocall that I think is illegal?
1) Call your local telephone company to file a complaint. You must give them the name of who called and if possible the telephone number of the robocaller (it may be provided in the message.)
2) Your telephone company will then tell the business that it is not following the law and may give it some time to correct the problem.
3) If the business does not correct the use of the robocaller by the time given by the telephone company, the telephone company can disconnect the phone line.
4) If you are not satisfied with the telephone company’s response to your robocall complaint, you may contact the CPUC’s Consumer Affairs Branch by filing a complaint online at http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/forms/Complaints/ or by telephone at 1-800-649-7570 or in writing to:
California Public Utilities Commission Consumer Affairs Branch 505 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102-3298.

Check your local state government website for similar laws. It’s a good idea to look at your caller ID and write down each phone number, especially if it’s an 866 (toll free), or an out of area (sometimes doesn’t show number). Keep pen and pad by the phone, and write down the number on your ID. Get in the habit. This will allow you to file complaints against these scumbag companies and eventually your state may go after them, if applicable. Of course, you can’t do anything about the calls coming from India (etc.), but many of these robo-callers think they have the right to harass you.

And bozos like Anthem use a system which will keep calling you EVERY DAY until you listen to their stupid message, and sit through the verbal feedback system to identify 1) the person calling is not available (they then ask to leave message), then 2) identify they have called the wrong number.

If you’re a customer, call their support number and ask them how to remove your phone number from ALL sales calls. If they fail to help you, ask how to cancel your policy.

Yeah, get in gear asshole. You (Anthem Blue Cross) just won our award for biggest scumbag robo-calling corporate prick of the month. Congratulations.

Notably, there are several things wrong with this “partnership” message. First, we already got a couple of these sent to our other sites (addressed to different named individuals). Second, there is nobody at our company, nor has there ever been, anybody named “Gordon” — which can clearly be found by looking at the staff page on our site. Third, we are a highly respected newswire service, and so why would we want to post another companies client’s on our site? That’s like calling up Pepsi and asking them if they would like to include some Coke product in their end-caps at the supermarket. Doh. Of course, since this is spam, they had no actual interest in a partnership, since they didn’t bother to look at the site they were sending it to, look at who runs the company, etc.

All the spam originated from 208.82.15.227.rainbowbroadband.com, and we sent a complaint (well, two actually) to the Rainbow Broadband admin listed at ARIN. Apparently an ISP located in New York.

If you type in the IP in Firefox, you also get this warning:
This Connection is Untrusted
You have asked Firefox to connect
securely to 208.82.15.227:4443, but we can’t confirm that your connection is secure.

In Internet Explorer, once you get past the bad security cert warning, the browser pops up a login/password dialog. This is common with log-ins for spam / bulk email applications.

It’s really too bad these start-ups and “also ran” companies feel compelled to spam businesses and websites in order to build an audience; why not buy advertising in the PR industry magazines if you’re serving the PR industry? Why not buy Google AdWords? Spam is the last choice for a company without moral character, in my opinion, and any company that sends bulk “unsolicited” (meaning the recipient didn’t ASK FOR IT) email should be banned from having Internet access.

In the case of this “company” spamming our sites with their fake partnership emails, which are nothing more than requests for website owners to carry their content. And they aren’t offering to pay the people receiving the spam, either. Wow – you want me to post your content on MY site for free? Suuuuuure.

Of course, on our contact us page it also states “do not send us partnership requests.” But since no human actually visited our site(s) before sending us all the spam, I shouldn’t expect manners or consideration.

I feel bad for their “2000 clients” who are now a party to this bad business practice, and who will likely eventually find their content on a block list along with anything this company does, thanks to their spam blasts.

In doing a reverse lookup at DomainTools for their main domain name, we can see a lot of IP changes over the years and folks who change the name server for their site 5 times in 4 years, usually means they are getting kicked off a system once their evil is uncovered (not sure if that applies here, just saying we’ve seen that to be the case in the past):
NS History – myprgenie . com :
5 changes on 5 unique name servers over 4 years.
IP History:
7 changes on 8 unique name servers over 5 years.

Follows is the spam email in question, for your enjoyment, derision, and if you need to validate your own complaints to Rainbow Broadband in a spam complaint.

Not sure yet whether we’ll send you a trophy, a certificate, or just include you in the annual roundup of the biggest spammers we’ve been annoyed by in 2010. Good job PRgenie!

In a relatively unscientific test we bought pizzas from several Domino’s outlets, both delivery and pick-up, and put the new round meals to the test. What we found, however, had more to do with the creation of the pizzas than the ingredients, in this simple test. One pizza was slightly over-cooked (almost burnt on the bottom), one had too much “brushed garlic” on the crust (must have used a house painting brush versus a chef’s brush, more oil than garlic), and one had none of the new garlic on the crust. It’s a new recipe, but the same old crew.

On the one with the best overall construction and balance, we did find that the sauce was better and a little more sauce than on past purchases, the cheese tasted more like a restaurant and less like those $1 per box frozen pizzas many of us had when we were either in school or first fled the next into our first apartments. The sauce was a little sweeter, and had some red pepper in it, and so had more of a sense you were eating restaurant pizza than a fast food product. The cheese did have more taste, and the mix of more than one type of cheese really helped. Crust was better, except the one with too much oil (seriously, three times more than it needed).

When done right, the new pizza is a definite improvement. I would have to say, I don’t find myself wanting to throw half of it away the next day as the last time I bought their product locally (in Southern Calif.); on the other hand, it was not as good as a comparable cost pizza from Papa John’s in my opinion, at least.

Stephen Colbert tried the new pizza on his show, on January 6, and whether you believe him or not, he claims the pizza is better (“did an angel just gave birth in my mouth”), but hilariously rips on how the old pizza was truly truly awful. He called Domino’s Pizza his “Alpha Dog of the Week.” (It’s funny to hear the audience vocally cringe as he’s about to take the first bite.)

CBS’s The Early Show did a report on the new effort, and the staff gave the new taste high marks.

Domino’s has also setup a website, at www.pizzaturnaround.com where they are actively doing both viral marketing and archiving industry and media response to their new campaign.

Surprise! If I were on a desert island and had the choice between coconut skins roasted on the fire or Domino’s new pizza, I would prefer the new pizza. It’s not superb, but it doesn’t entirely suck. Room for improvement, yes; but primarily in the efforts of the crews building the pizzas and baking them. Better than the box it’s delivered in? Definitely a yes.

Now, while this falls about as low as one can get down the pole of what matters in the world right now, below unemployment, health care, and so forth, it’s nevertheless become a rallying cry, or topic du jour for the design community who despair over things as minute as the space between headline letters (ahem, I do that, too, admittedly; it’s called “kerning”), that Ikea has switched from a rich custom type font, to the lowest common denominator, a type face created for the Internet by Microsoft, called Verdana. A style of type which was not designed for print where the lovely bits interact with ink and paper, but for the cold cathode ray tube (CRT), and other display technologies which have evolved into LCD, OLED, plasma, and e-ink.

The main upset seems to stem from the fact that Ikea has “always been known for design.” And this is true, to an extent. Ikea has always had a mix of super cheap pressed board crap clothed in lovely colors and silly Sweden-inspired names with a healthy dose of umlauts, very cool desk accessories, storage stuff, and some often inspired decor pieces, as well as some lovely high-end “real wood” furniture pieces. I know, my curved desk I’m working on now, my bedroom furniture, my living room wall unit, and book cases all came from Ikea during the ’90s. I’ve been a graphic designer since my teenage years (ahem, the late ’70s/early ’80s), and I always “dug” the stuff at Ikea because it was both affordable, but some was really cool, too. Plummers was here first, and I tend to like their stuff better now, but Ikea really was a fun place to walk through and look at the mix of whacky desk lamps, and grid design flat-packed furniture.

So, this issue with Verdana … well, the problem stems (sort of a pun there for you typographers) from the fact that it doesn’t look as good when printed large as a headline, compared to a font which has been “drawn” to look good at large sizes, letter space (kerning) is harder to control, and because it’s a wide, open style, whereas many headline styles are designed to have thinner curves, and narrower widths to fit better in page layouts. Verdana just wasn’t built for the world of magazines and newspapers. All you really need to do is look at any price that has a 1 in it, like a large $129 price. The horizontal space, or white space between the 1 and 2 is too much, and creates an unpleasant empty space, even when kerned close together. Yeah, it’s true. But, really, so what. Verdana works because it’s big, blocky and seems to be missing subtle curves in places, and sometimes looks like it’s bold, even when it’s not. But you can read it at a distance, up close, and it shouts its readability. Not as pretty as the old font, admittedly.

But really, is that a bad thing? I am very knowledgeable about type, having gone to Compugraphic Typesetting School in 1984, and I also got my start in design with blue pencils, and dry-transfer lettering which went onto art boards by hand. I had my own typesetting business in 1987, and I started doing Web design in 1994. Verdana was a popular font once it was introduced because it looked great at font size 1 in HTML, whereas Times and Arial/Helvetica did not. Before CSS, it was common practice to use Verdana for footers, captions, small type, superscripts, and navigation. And for text on, ironically, many of the design oriented Web sites that wanted to use something other than Times or Helvetica.

Yes, Verdana is a font introduced by Microsoft, and was often eschewed by the Mac oriented design community simply because of that, and it being a “Web font,” not designed for print. Funny thing, too, is that the Mac version of another Microsoft font, Georgia, really does look gorgeous on the Mac, and has many of the traditional type elements, where the Windows version is more blocky. I ran into this when I chose to use Georgia for our company logo in 2000, but when we switched to Windows XP in 2006, the font didn’t look the same when you viewed it at 400%, or printed it at headline sizes like 72 pt. I haven’t looked at Verdana on the Mac lately vs. on Windows, but wouldn’t be surprised if there is a slight difference there as well. I chose Georgia for our company for the exact same reason Ikea chose Verdana, it’s a cross-platform, multi-language, multi-format type face – meaning, you can use it for print, for Web, for PDF, for video, and you can have a consistency. And, it does look very clean and open when translated to other languages; Microsoft did a great job at that.

Now it turns out Ikea is on the defensive because designers claim they have been violated, betrayed, and that Ikea should go back to its original corporate fonts. There is even a petition circulating to tell Ikea to go back to its original style.

In my opinion, that’s a mistake. Frankly, Ikea is acting in a designer frame of mind, they have chosen to go their own way and embrace a standardized font which everybody recognizes. What many of the dinosaur design community is missing is that many of Ikea’s core audience, the folks getting their first apartments, their dorm room furnishings, first couple living together, etc., are now folks who grew up with the Internet. Many of the young adults buying their first EXPEDIT, JAVNAKER, or KVART, have more experience reading their iMac screen, and MySpace page than they do reading the New York Times or Newsweek.

Frankly, Verdana “communicates” very well with youth culture because it’s the typeface of their generation, not their great grandparents. Sure, Futura or Optima, or any of the lovely Adobe or ITC fonts give us a rich history of details in the hand-making of letter styles, but for advertising, marketing and the sale of goods and services, this was a calculated and intelligent design choice.

It’s a business, not a design contest. In a worldwide depressed economy, anything a company can do to standardize, and become more efficient should be applauded and not derided. Of course, most designers work for somebody else and don’t have to deal with the business issues. Very few are both left brain and right brain enough to understand why Ikea has chosen to do this. The negative publicity the design community has drawn out regarding this change has, in fact, proven the point that Ikea’s designers made the right choice. End of days? Not quite.

Isn’t it a designer’s prerogative to buck conventions and question the standard way of doing something, and choose not to do what is expected? What’s wrong with choosing to use the “wrong” thing, to make the right choice for a brand style? Kudos Ikea team, you make me proud for proving you do have what it takes to be a mover in the world of design.

Megan is perfect for this since her “vibe” in both the film and the PSA is not far removed from her public persona, real or constructed. We don’t expect Reese Witherspoon to drop the f-bomb in anything, but it seems like daily bread for the gorgeous Ms. Fox.

From the other trailers, she seems well cast, as she treads familiar waters as she has in past films (ie., “Teenage Drama Queen”), but now looks more worldly for her age (well, she’s not 16 anymore, right?). Megan is right where Angelina Jolie was while doing films like Hackers, so it will be interesting to see how she evolves from a pretty face to a potentially major talent once the “sexiest woman alive” period passes.

Overall, an A+ for this particular movie push.
– Christopher Simmons

Well, here we are again the last couple of days of the calendar month, now February, and the ads have come back, and numerous folks have suddenly noticed them and started mentioning it as if it was entirely a new thing. Which, it seems like it will be officially full-time come March 1st.

Certainly we can’t begrudge was is ostensibly a “free” online service from pushing ads in our face, much like everything else in our society (the local TV stations now sell their helicopters in “wraps,” so the choppers look like giant flying McDonalds billboards — at least the birds can see them and fly away in terror); but, for me, it is very distracting from reading the news when doing specific searches, since I am not looking for ads, in the same way I might be when searching in the “main” search engine. Sigh.

Of course, I’ve learned to ignore the ads wrapping my mom’s whacky pet photos in my gmail account, and I tune out most other things at some point, so I’m sure I’ll get used to it. It’s funny to see the kinds of ads that show up in relation to news searches, since I typically look for news on topics completely different from what I might search for in the main engine. Particularly bizarre was a search I was going on behalf of one of my clients, who is running for Los Angeles mayor on a pro-cannabis platform, and he happens to be a pastor. In doing a search for pastor and marijuana, and Los Angeles, some really odd and particularly “adult” results came up. I’ve tried to replicate that, to no avail.

A posting on a Google company blog by Josh Cohen, a business product manager at Google, had this to say:

In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP. We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too.

Oh well. Now I have to see competitor ads when looking for my own company and client news items. Kind of annoying, and sometimes I find myself wanting to click on the ads from a competitor to use up their ad budget. Er, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? (Did I type that out loud…whoops.)

[tags]Google News ads[/tags]

Pay per click (PPC), and pay for position (PFP), advertising was pioneered by the folks at Goto.com (which became Overture, now part of Yahoo!), then picked up as a good idea in different flavors by companies like Findwhat.com (disclosure: I was on the FW launch team), Google, and MSN. It’s a great concept, type in a search for tennis shoes and you might find an ad for my favorite online shoe store Eastbay.com, or type in computer parts and you might find a popular PC parts vendor Newegg.com.

That’s great for advertisers, and great for online shops and sellers. It is called “contextual advertising,” where ads which are related (in context) to what somebody is viewing, are shown. Makes total sense. If you’re doing a search about guitars, why shouldn’t you see advertisements about guitar shops and online music stores?

Where this process gets a bit contentious, and in some cases downright ugly, is when you type in a search for a major brand, or even a registered trademark, and competitors can bid to buy a spot higher than you, under your own brand. Imagine looking in the white pages of your phone book and right above the listing for Pizza Hut (alphabetically), there would be a boxed add for Domino’s Pizza. Might this not cause confusion, or be some kind of unfair competition?

You might think so. However did you pay for that white page listing? No. Similarly you and I are not paying Google to list our site in their directory (arguably if you’re paying Yahoo! to be listed this could be treated differently, as we’ll see later). So, in effect, Google’s builders believe that they can do anything with what is in their system and your trademark, brand, personal name, or product, is fair game to any advertiser.

Well, isn’t that free enterprise? Sure. But what got my nipple nuts in a twist was the placement of Google’s AdWords advertising and Yahoo! ads within other sites’ content under my registered trademark — my brand which I’ve spent seven hard years building into a respected entity in the PR business.

Mixed Messages in Advertising Placement
For instance, not long ago I happened to be looking on Technorati for my site’s submitted content under our brand, Send2Press�, and I was a bit surprised to see an advertisement for some newbie upstart in my industry called Mass Media Distribution with an ad right above my content listings, and then again in the middle halfway down the page. I thought… “W.T.F.” then said it aloud for personal emphasis to mine own ears.

I contacted Technorati, and was told they couldn’t do anything about it since it was Yahoo! ads being served based on the keyword or searched term. (Note: coincidentally, about a month after my complaint, Technorati changed their page layout, and the contextual ads don’t sit within content listings for tag searches, but do still sit atop results for “in blog posts” results. Oddly, when I checked today, they have now switched to Google ads in place of Yahoo! results.)

So, I trundled (virtually of course) off to Yahoo! and tracked down the page on their website to issue a complaint about unfair use of my precious U.S. registered trademark. Yes, steam was coming out of my ears, but admittedly, partly because I’d been caught with my pants down by somebody who found a loophole in non-traditional advertising and was trying to put their brand name front and center in front of my clients and audience. All I could think though, was “Damn dirty apes!” and let my fingers stab at the keyboard while hunting down where Yahoo! hides such information in their advertising system.

First thing to do was go place a bid in Yahoo!’s ad system, and suffer the indignity of having to outbid some upstart company for my own trademarked brand. Done. Then I went again in search of the page on Yahoo! to address this. Luckily, since Yahoo! does offer paid inclusion in their search, they do have to respond to this kind of issue since it’s arguably a conflict of interest to sell inclusion, and then let somebody bid on an advert that will run above your listing in their search engine. Or, at least that was my thinking, which could be blind hope on my part as to what’s right and what’s wrong in this mixed-up world of online advertising.

So, I was unable to locate the trademark page, but I did put in a query with their information request form, and they sent me back a personal response and link to the trademark page: “Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. So that we may properly investigate this issue, please go to the appropriate page on our Web site, as outlined below and provide some additional information: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/legal/trademarks.php. Once there, please review our trademark policy and provide us with the information. Please send the information directly to the e-mail address given on the Trademark Information page: trademarkconcern-ysm @yahoo-inc.com.”

One minor amusing point is that all of the emails back from Yahoo! on this matter all came from the Overture mail system. Hasn’t it been a couple of years since Yahoo! switched Overture’s brand out of the mix?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that three days after sending in my concerns and proof of the problem, my trademark status with the US PTO, and heartfelt ramblings, I got this letter back from Yahoo’s support:

Dear Chris:
Thank you for your correspondence. This email will serve as our response, you will not receive further notification from us.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We hope that we have addressed your concerns.
Thank you.
Trademark Department
Yahoo! Search Marketing

First, I was happy to get any response from Yahoo!, since other queries to the company over the past few years related to content and branding proposals have gone into a black hole of doom (aka the round file). And, about two weeks later, the little varmint who had been buying ads against my brand on Technorati was no longer included. Yahoo! had gone with the side of right and helped protect the big guy from the little guy.

Yahoooo oooooh! (How do you do the Yahoo! yodel in print?)

The Goo the Bad and The Ugly at the Googleplex
Whew! Now, onto the Google side of this story. At about the same time, I went and bid on my own brand on Google AdWords, which I’d never had to do before, except when my main company changed its name from Mindset to Neotrope� at the end of the ’90s. I still run an ad for Mindset, so that my old customers and friends can track me down, since the business was known as Mindset from 1983-1999. That’s where contextual advertising really comes in handy. (Ahem, ironically, the companies now calling themselves Mindset might complain, but since they are part of the reason I changed the company name to avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars to litigate them, I will state that I have every right to be doing the exact thing I’m complaining about, in this particular instance).

Just for laughs, I went and did some test searches, and it seems like the Mass Media Distribution folks are trying really hard to let everybody else know about them by buying ads under every major player in the news distribution business: Send2Press�, Business Wire�, PR Newswire�, Market Wire, and even the outfits that resell PRN services such as eReleases�.

To mess with these Mass Media Distribution folks a little bit for a couple of months in response to their activities, I bought a keyword against their company name so when you typed in “Mass Media Distribution,” you would see one of my ads next to their Google listings. Tit for tat, baby. Seems like eReleases had the same idea, since they’re buying ads under “mass media distribution,” as well. I’ll probably stop, since it’s a waste of money in my opinion.

On the other hand, to take things a step further, since my company has been one of the leaders in SEO since 1996, I started to do some “keyword seeding” in our ContextEngine� system under “mass media distribution services” and my site now comes up as the second organic site listed in Google out of 12.1 million results. And this was without even trying. Since their brand consists of three common words, it is not particularly challenging to build content around those words. They will also have issues trying to trademark their dotcom business name, since it’s so generic.

It’s all about competition in the marketplace, right? Where I think this gets really annoying is that if you build a brand called “Mary’s Wedding Dresses of Santa Barbara” another seamstress across the street could buy ads and even outbid you for your own company name, if not your own personal name, simply by buying an ad on Google.

What is Google’s response? First, their form is hard to find, is badly implemented, and states you need to fax or mail them the information, which it seems you do not, since once the form is submitted, they tell you you’re done and need do nothing else. Their trademark form, which you will have to search for here: https://adwords.google.com/support, requires you to list a number of things such as the trademark, registration number, and ownership info.

The canned response reads like this (Jan. 8): “Thank you for using our online trademark complaint form. We have received your complaint and have queued it for review. Once our investigation of your complaint is complete, we will send you an email confirmation. Please note that we receive a high volume of trademark complaints and address them in the order they are received. We appreciate your patience.”

About a month later (Feb. 6), here is the final response: “Thank you for sending us your trademark complaint letter. Your complaint has been processed and the ads in question no longer include your trademark: SEND2PRESS. Please note, we only processed the exact trademark you submitted. If you would like us to investigate variations or misspellings of your trademark, please supply us with a list of the exact variations or misspellings and we will review them. If you have additional questions, please ask.”

Thanks Google. But hey, guess what. Now there are three companies bidding against my trademark, which includes a sister company to MMD, called PRbuzz (well, of course by company, I mean a website), and I’m no longer the highest bidder. Not that I plan to get into a bidding war for my own company name. One study suggests that actually being the lowest bidder on the right in Google ads, when there are less than four advertisers, is actually more visible to viewers, since if somebody reads down the page in organic listings, then reads back up the right side, the lowest advert is actually seen first. But that’s minor comfort.

It turns out that Google’s trademark policy turns out to only protect brand holders from advertisers using the brand in their actual ads. So, this means that the Mass Media Distribution and PRbuzz people can buy ads which appear under my trademark, and even outbid me for placement all over the Internet for Google AdSense placements, but they cannot use my brand in their ads. So, they couldn’t have an ad reading “We will Send2Press your press release.”

Perhaps this is better than nothing, since it does provide some protection from a company saying “We have better services than mass media distribution,” or “Why settle for a ‘prbuzz’ when you can get real coverage with a legitimate newswire.” Of course, those “brands” are not registered U.S. trademarks, so under both Yahoo! and Google’s rules, I could conceivably use those brand names in my own advertising. Maybe I should do something like “get the REAL prbuzz here” or “Send2Press offers the best mass media distribution since 1983.” But that would be wrong, wouldn’t it?

ARE YOU SURROUNDED? Examples of counter branding: 1) buying the top spot in Google AdWords, which appears above the organic listings; 2) secondary bidders against a brand term or trademark; 3) organic placement using SEO methods against a brand name.

Confusing the Consumer for Fun and Profit
I personally find this irritating, not simply from a competitive standpoint, but from a “confusing the customer” perspective. I run into customer service calls all the time from people who don’t understand how to use search engines, what the information being presented to them really means, or where they are being sent when they click links.

I had one person call me last year who complained I was spamming them about my PR and press release services. I replied that we never send spam to anybody, ever, and it’s our corporate policy to never send promotional emails about our company or services. She said I’m seeing your page right here on my screen, and I said where did you get that URL from? And she said your promotional email. I said what company sent you the email, and she rattled off some no-name start-up news spammer claiming to send 10,000 people a press release for $50. Stupidly, they had put a Google AdSense box across the top of the page which was feeding ads from all other press release services firms, one of which was my site. So, since it was at the top of the page (above the logos and navbar for the site), she assumed it was my site and that I had spammed her. She clicked the link from that site in the ad box, which sent her to my site, which is how she got my phone number.

Ironically, she ended up becoming a customer once I showed her that we were a real 24-year old PR and brand identity company and not a dotcom sending out spam to try to sell questionable bulk email services to people wanting to send press releases to the media. And this woman was a veteran PR professional, not a first time Internet user.

With this example in mind, I am worried that easily confused potential customers who type in my company name in Google — perhaps after seeing one of my many interviews in Entrepreneur Magazine, or my inclusion in a new business book for women business owners (Career and Corporate Cool™ by Rachel C. Weingarten, ISBN-10: 0470120347), or similar — and then see a new competitor’s ad in a featured box above my organic listings, might thus cause my customer to be directed elsewhere than to me. While my new competitors want exactly this kind of thing to happen on Google and elsewhere, I do not. (I use the word “competitor” loosely, since I don’t expect them to steal much business after looking at what they do, but you never know.)

Planning for Contextual Counter Branding
When planning any contextual marketing and PPC or PFP program, the issue of counter-branding such as MMD is doing, is something every company should take into account. Much like buying up alternate domain names to protect your brand identity from “typo squatters” it now seems more important than ever to include a budget component for PPC against your own brand and product names to ensure transparency with potential customers as to who is whom.

For search engines this is, of course, a win-win for them in getting more advertising from both sides of the counter-branding arena. So, there is no great incentive for them to change, unless the lawyers get involved.

One easy way to check if your brand or product names are at risk is to log-in to your advertising account with any major search portal and do a bid against your company name or product brand, and see if there are other bidders. Depending on the bid preview, you may have to enter the smallest acceptable bid and see if somebody else would have a higher position. Simply checking the search engine by typing in your brands may not always reveal everything, since all contextual ad accounts allow for budgeting, such as “stop when it reaches $100″ so it might be that you have a competitor whose ads only show for the first week out of every month, or only show up on content sites and not the main search engine results.

Using SEO practices to counter-brand can be tricky since litigation can ensue for mis-use of a trademark. For example if MMD started putting my registered trademarks within meta tags of their site pages simply to show up in search results under my brand, they would get an immediate cease and desist from my lawyer.

It seems more important than ever to spend the money and get yourself a trademark attorney (I use a fellow by the name of Matthew J. Booth, www.boothlaw.com) and register any brand you consider viable and which is not simply a dotcom that you’ve thrown up to stick your toe in the water. With some search portals, like Yahoo!, having a registered trademark can be critical to removing potential confusion by way of keyword brand bandits.

And, of course, the best solution is to simply do a better job than your upstart competitors. Strong deliverables, long-term stability, credible management and staff, and proof of performance for any service business will still always put you on top in any marketing program.

All trademarks, service marks, and registered trademarks in this article are the property of the respective mark holders, and are acknowledged.

[tags]contextual counter branding, trademark bandits, Christopher Laird Simmons, When Advertising Attacks, legal issues with context ads, pay per click bandits, mass media distribution services, getting the prbuzz[/tags]