Staking your claims in the online world can be easier said than done. The exponential growth of the internet - and the technological advancements responsible for its widespread availability - has opened up a treasure chest of new advertising opportunities for marketing companies. It's also a chest that never seems to empty, as the constant evolution of the medium ensures that new opportunities arise for innovative advertisers looking to fill their pockets with gold. However, ensuring that your brand has sufficient presence on the web is not always simple - even for some of the strongest players in the world.Applications for trademarks and brand terms boomed during the dot-com years and, despite a sharp fall in the early naughties, rose to a record of more than 394,000 last year, the New York Times reported. While cybersquatting - the process by which unscrupulous profiteers who purchased the URLs of trademarked brands to then sell them on at an inflated price - is no longer the problem it once was, new fronts have opened in the battle to secure online territory.
According to the New York Times, companies are hoping to brand products and services that are, as yet, still nebulous and undefined. For example, Dell tried to trademark the term 'cloud computing', a buzz phrase that encompasses a wide range of internet services and the process involved with accessing information held in cyberspace from various devices. However, the United States Patent and Trademark Office turned down approval of the application as experts asserted that the phrase has become a broadly descriptive term within the industry.
As the value of brands escalates and branded or navigational searches are on the up the importance of protecting your brand name is also amplified. Legal experts have suggested that trademark owners will progressively be searching for new ways to stifle online criticisms of their products or services. The battle for trademarked terms online also increased significantly, following Google's introduction of keyword bidding on all keyword terms in the US and Canada in 2004 and the UK and Ireland earlier this year.
This means that, within these countries, competitors are able to bid for the terms commonly used by other companies. Subsequently, building up and retaining your brand has become an increasingly significant part of many business' online strategies - as the importance of retaining a recognisable brand is widely documented. However, applications for trademarked terms are subject to the approval of the trademark office - an organisation that finds itself deluged with new and unusual applications from companies hoping to establish their names on the web.
