Musings from The Software Underground

I recently received notice from Google that some of our Google ads, which I've been running for easily 2 years, were deactivated because of the use of the work "Mac" in the ad. So, let me get this straight. We make Mac products. We can't say the word "Mac" in the ads?

Clearly we're not alone in this:

Google Adwords Prohibits "Mac" In Ads
AdWords and Trademarks

My questions to Google, have of course gone unanswered, but according to one poster on the MacSB list, EVERY Mac developer now needs express written permission from Apple to use the word "Mac" in ads, and this written permission must then be faxed to Google. I'm now evaluating whether or not to continue running Google ads at all. More and more I notice the clear "watering down" of the resulting ads for a query. Back in the day, a very specific query would yield very specific ad results. They were useful, and very well targeted. Now, it seems 1/2 to 3/4, if not all the resulting ads are now pretty generic ways to get you to nextag.com, amazon.com and other very large, very non-specific sites that really don't offer what you were searching for. In addition, if you do a search for "mac recipe software" you get mostly ads for Windows apps. Huh? It appears that they are ignoring the "Mac" qualifier and just posting ads for "recipe software." Pretty useless, both to us as advertisers, and to users who are searching for Mac not Windows recipe software.

Granted, it appears that Apple requested this move by Google and Apple seems more and more NOT to be the cute, cuddly company we've been used to, but still, I'm sorry to say it kids, I think this is the beginning of the end of the Google, at least as far as AdWords go, that we all knew and loved, the pre-many-multiple-billion-dollar-IPO version.