This video is about how I pissed off Google and how Google search contributed. The book referenced has been re-branded as Dominate Advertising Online. It is available at the link below: http://www.halfpasthuman.com/bitch.html
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| Hello. | |
| My name's Cliff High. | |
| I run halfpasthuman.com. | |
| I need to tell you real quickly about how I pissed off Google and apologize for it. | |
| Basically, the situation is that I had been contacted by some readers of my material. | |
| They had some issues with their advertising online. | |
| They were wasting a lot of money. | |
| They wanted some linguistic help. | |
| I set about to do that. | |
| There were enough of them contacting me that I knew there was at least a niche market for this material, so I set about making a book. | |
| I made a book and I called it Make AdWords Your Bitch. | |
| My problem was that there's a trademarked symbol in there, which is the word AdWords, A-D-W-O-R-D-S. | |
| Now, I've been using that word, AdWords, here for about five years, because about 2010, I started running across these words in the general giant conversation that is the internet when I swept it for my predictive linguistics stuff. | |
| And I had to filter out all the AdWords because, and they show up in my work very glaringly, mostly, because they're linguistically, emotively, linguistically inappropriate. | |
| So you're having a conversation that's flowing one way, and then all of a sudden it skews over there with the introduction of this AdWord thing in there, this advertising keyword. | |
| Now, I did not know at the time that I wrote this book because I've never done any advertising online up until recently, never bothered to even look at it. | |
| It was never even entered my consciousness. | |
| I just did my work and figured universe would find it. | |
| I didn't have to go out and advertise it. | |
| Advertising is fun. | |
| I've gotten into it since I've been asked to by these few readers. | |
| I wrote this little book, Make AdWords Your Bitch, which has now been retitled, rebranded to dominate advertising online. | |
| And here's the situation. | |
| I pissed Google off because I wrote a book, used a trademark word in that title, and then set about advertising and selling that book. | |
| Now, I did this 100% in ignorance that that word was trademarked. | |
| And I had done it without being an ignorant pig because I'd done my due diligence. | |
| I searched AdWords for a trademark symbol on Google's own site before I've made it into my title. | |
| And this is what the point of this video is about. | |
| I'm going to show you a Google search on Google's site that shows AdWords is not trademarked. | |
| And I'm going to show you that you can make that same search using Google AdWords repeatedly and you won't see a trademark symbol, except occasionally you will. | |
| Last night I was seeing the trademark symbol once out of every 20 plus searches. | |
| It would show up sometimes three or four times in a search of six iterations and then not again for 14 or 20 times. | |
| So it was really inconsistent. | |
| It's not so, it's not every other one. | |
| It's not every third one. | |
| There's a weird kind of a pattern there. | |
| It's very variable. | |
| I've got some thinking I've done about it, but I don't know for sure. | |
| Nonetheless, though, when I wrote my book a couple of weeks ago and got it ready to title it, I titled it at the end of the process, and I went and I searched on Google to see if AdWords was trademarked. | |
| Now I'm going to swing around here and let you see the screen and you'll see that there's no trademark symbol there. | |
| And we'll do a couple more searches for AdWords and see if it can show up. | |
| I'd like to show it to somebody and then show that we don't normally see it. | |
| Because my thing is that what happened, I'll show you in a second, but what happened here was I had an advertising campaign going. | |
| It's really phenomenally successful. | |
| It's on Twitter. | |
| I love Twitter. | |
| Twitter is real time. | |
| People give Twitter all kinds of grief and they shouldn't. | |
| They just don't understand Twitter. | |
| I mean, in terms of advertisers, they don't like Twitter because they don't understand it. | |
| They don't know how to make it perform. | |
| But my approach really did make it perform. | |
| I was putting in $15.26 worth of ad cost on Twitter to get $693 in sales. | |
| And that was consistently holding. | |
| In fact, I could do better than that on some other advertising keywords. | |
| That's what I have to start using now instead of the word AdWords. | |
| Apologies to Google. | |
| I did not know it was trademarked. | |
| So in using advertising keywords and developing an advertising campaign on Twitter, I was doing very good. | |
| I had a response that had 5,160% return on investment at one point. | |
| And then last night I go to check my ads, as is my habit after doing my work on my reports and stuff. | |
| I go to do the housekeeping work. | |
| And so I went to check my ads and there's this big giant red banner saying basically you screwed up. | |
| And it was on Twitter and they were saying you can't advertise anymore because you've been a bad boy. | |
| And then they gave me some hints in a general sense as to what my offense might have been. | |
| Now, at first I thought it was the innuendo, the sexual innuendo I was using as A theme, as a thread, a linguistic thread for my advertising campaign. | |
| And I am sense of the opinion, probably not. | |
| No one's actually told me what my offense was. | |
| I've sent in a help ticket asking to have it explicitly explained to me. | |
| I'm pretty sure it was using AdWords, and I'm pretty sure Google complained to Twitter. | |
| And had I been Google, I would have bitched too. | |
| Now, I'm just a different kind of a guy. | |
| They're a corporation. | |
| They can't do things that way. | |
| If it had been me, I would have called me and I would have corrected it because I'm a nice guy, right? | |
| I'm not trying to scam them or anything. | |
| I did this in ignorance. | |
| I did not know. | |
| And in fact, they contributed. | |
| They helped me not know. | |
| But so, in my own defense, as soon as I discovered that there was a potential that AdWords was indeed trademarked, I went and removed it all away from all of my material. | |
| Redid the website, redid the web page, redid the book. | |
| You know, with universal search and replace, it's not that big of a deal. | |
| So the book's being translated now by some friends of mine in German and Spanish. | |
| I've addressed that. | |
| I took down all of my videos off of YouTube that used that term. | |
| I need to remake these videos on how to use the product, but I won't be using AdWords. | |
| Sorry about that. | |
| Dust all over and I've been cleaning up. | |
| So anyway, we're at a situation where, or at a point here, where my ads have been stopped by Twitter. | |
| I want to continue them. | |
| I've redone everything. | |
| I'm actually very apologetic to Twitter too because I didn't want them in this position of being in the middle of this between Google and myself. | |
| I'm assuming that they're in the middle, and I'm assuming as well that Google is on the other side. | |
| And I didn't want to piss off Google. | |
| I've got no problems with them. | |
| I like them. | |
| They're good guys. | |
| You know, I feel for them. | |
| They're drowning in data. | |
| And, you know, they're running as hard as they can. | |
| And the data mountain keeps growing faster than they can search the thing. | |
| So, you know, so they've got some real challenges over these next 100 years or whatever as they move into this new millennium with the rest of us. | |
| Anyway, so like I say, I apologize to Google. | |
| I did this inadvertently and I did do my due diligence though. | |
| And your own site does not show the trademark claim. | |
| Therefore, I assumed it was, you guys used it the same way I do as a generic term, you know, like facial tissue, right? | |
| As opposed to a brand name, Scott's or Kleenex or something. | |
| But I didn't know it was a brand name. | |
| Again, I apologize. | |
| I've corrected the offense. | |
| I would not have done it had I known. | |
| And I would not have done it had Google not contributed to the situation by not having it on their site consistently. | |
| So now let's zoom in and have a quick look and then everybody can get back to their day. | |
| This is just kind of a weird situation. | |
| Let me see if I can get at that. | |
| So now I'm going to search for AdWords on Google's own site, and we'll see if we can actually get them to show us a trademark symbol, and it'll The data is going to appear over here. | |
| So I'm going to focus the camera. | |
| Let's get our search there. | |
| Okay, so now I'm going to, oops. | |
| I'm sorry, guys. | |
| I'm just not very good at all this video crap yet. | |
| Okay. | |
| There we go. | |
| So you see right off on top, there's no trademark symbol near AdWords. | |
| I've actually found it in one of their ads where it does show up. | |
| Let me reinitiate, redid the ads. | |
| There's no trademark symbol anywhere the word AdWords appears. | |
| And I'm going to back it out a little bit here so you see a bit more of the whole screen. | |
| And you'll see, I mean, I'm touching each and every one of these. | |
| There's simply no trademark symbol in there. | |
| I'll run the thing again. | |
| Again, it's not, there's no trademark. | |
| So at this stage, I mean, I can repeat that query pretty much indefinitely. | |
| I was able to run a Perl script and had it pop off a bunch. | |
| And out of something slightly shy of 1200 queries on AdWords, we had 95, 95 times out of 1,200 it would show a trademark symbol. | |
| This was running it last night. | |
| So like I say, there you go. | |
| That's the story of how I pissed off Google. | |
| Didn't mean to. | |
| It was my fault. | |
| I shouldn't have done it. | |
| And they should not have let me do it. | |
| No, I'm not copying that. | |
| I'm not saying it wasn't my fault. | |
| And I have indeed corrected it all. | |
| But interesting, you can't trust search. | |
| So, if you're going to do this, you've got to do a really serious search and not trust what the search engines present. | |
| I guess that's the lesson. | |
| Thank you much for watching. |