May 2009 Archives

At my session at SES this year I reviewed the current legal position of trademark bidding and made the confident forecast that this one will run and run. 

Seemed like a safe prediction - and for once I was right!

According to Outlaw, the case between Interflora and Marks and Spencer has now been referred to the European Court of Justice for a final ruling, where it joins a bunch of actions from other European brands.

Meanwhile there were a couple of interesting things from the summing up of the High Court judge in London:

1. It’s pretty strange that Google is running a different set of rules on trademark bidding in the UK and Ireland to the rest of Europe, given that ultimately we are controlled under the same set of laws.  But the reason is that trademark laws are quite different here to mainland Europe.  And hence any judgement in Europe may not really clear up the situation in the UK.
2. Interflora has quantified the loss it has suffered from the introduction of competitive bidding.  According to the High Court ruling: "Interflora's bidding costs for their keywords during the nine days leading up to Valentine's Day increased from 2p per click in 2008 to 23-28p per click in 2009. Interflora estimate that in total their costs will have increased by about $750,000 in the year from 5 May 2008."

Given that this case will definitely drag on and may not even clear up the UK situation, it’s well worth brands doing a similar calculation of the material loss they believe they may have suffered.  There’s always the possibility – however slim – that the case will finally be settled, will go against Google, and that compensation will be paid. 

A month since our last celeb chart, so what’s new?

Last month I confidently predicted that Richard Bacon would soon be top five – and naturally I was wrong.  He has almost doubled his follower count, but only makes it to number six.

The story instead is of the rise of musicians, with Lily Allen and Imogen Heap both easing into the top five – replacing Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. 

With Coldplay now massively out at the front of the pack, it seems that Twitter could be replacing MySpace as the primary way for musicians to connect with their fans. 

Finally one big new entry to the chart – Eddie Izzard rocks in with 250k followers – an unfortunate omission (although he was born in the Yemen, so possibly doesn’t count!).  With Eddie’s arrival, Rob Brydon (46k) drops off the chart for the time being.

Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions.  It excludes searches from a contestants own country, because you can’t vote for your own entry.

Personally I’ll be impressed if Google can pull this off.  As any student of Eurovision knows, simple ‘popularity’ ranks quite a bit behind the simmering stew of post-cold war politics across Europe in terms of influence on voting.  So the countries of the former Soviet Union may hate Russia at a governmental level, but the large numbers of Russian diaspora guarantee a healthy slug of votes flowing back to Mother Russia.

Presumably search volume – and hence accuracy – will improve closer to the final on the 16th May.  Right now Google has Turkey and Norway neck and neck for the win, just ahead of Greece.  The punters on Betfair have the same top three, but with Norway clearly ahead of Greece and Turkey.