Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Due to a default judgment in a lawsuit brought against the similarly named Orion Bancorp, a Florida court has ordered Orion Residential Finance to declare “orion” a negative keyword in any broad search advertising they embark on in the future.

What this means is that if Orion Residential wants to do search advertising on words like “bank” or “finance,” they must make Orion a negative keyword so that if somebody searches for “orion bank” or “orion finance,” their ads must not appear.

Orion Bancorp brought the suit arguing that the two had a confusingly similar name, and ended up winning when Orion Residential didn’t file a response to the lawsuit. Their default led not only to Orion Bancorp getting the orionbank.com domain name, but the judge added the following restriction:

from purchasing or using any form of advertising including keywords or “adwords” in internet advertising containing any mark incorporating Plaintiff’s Mark, or any confusingly similar mark, and shall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term “ORION” as negative keywords or negative adwords1 in any internet advertising purchased or used.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There has already been a good deal of discussion about Google allowing companies to advertising using competitor names, and Utah has even outlawed this kind of advertising.

Thanks to Nate Anderson at Ars Technica for the story.

Technorati Tags: negative keywords, orion, google, search advertising