Clif High - How i screwed up and pissed off Google!
Aired: 2016-09-01
Duration: 10:09


=== Pissing Off Google (06:42) ===

[00:00:02]  Hello.
[00:00:03]  My name's Cliff High.
[00:00:05]  I run halfpasthuman.com.
[00:00:07]  I need to tell you real quickly about how I pissed off Google and apologize for it.
[00:00:13]  Basically, the situation is that I had been contacted by some readers of my material.
[00:00:18]  They had some issues with their advertising online.
[00:00:21]  They were wasting a lot of money.
[00:00:23]  They wanted some linguistic help.
[00:00:24]  I set about to do that.
[00:00:26]  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.
[00:00:34]  I made a book and I called it Make AdWords Your Bitch.
[00:00:37]  My problem was that there's a trademarked symbol in there, which is the word AdWords, A-D-W-O-R-D-S.
[00:00:46]  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.
[00:01:01]  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.
[00:01:13]  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.
[00:01:21]  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.
[00:01:29]  It was never even entered my consciousness.
[00:01:31]  I just did my work and figured universe would find it.
[00:01:33]  I didn't have to go out and advertise it.
[00:01:36]  Advertising is fun.
[00:01:36]  I've gotten into it since I've been asked to by these few readers.
[00:01:41]  I wrote this little book, Make AdWords Your Bitch, which has now been retitled, rebranded to dominate advertising online.
[00:01:49]  And here's the situation.
[00:01:51]  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.
[00:02:00]  Now, I did this 100% in ignorance that that word was trademarked.
[00:02:07]  And I had done it without being an ignorant pig because I'd done my due diligence.
[00:02:13]  I searched AdWords for a trademark symbol on Google's own site before I've made it into my title.
[00:02:20]  And this is what the point of this video is about.
[00:02:22]  I'm going to show you a Google search on Google's site that shows AdWords is not trademarked.
[00:02:29]  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.
[00:02:38]  Last night I was seeing the trademark symbol once out of every 20 plus searches.
[00:02:44]  It would show up sometimes three or four times in a search of six iterations and then not again for 14 or 20 times.
[00:02:54]  So it was really inconsistent.
[00:02:56]  It's not so, it's not every other one.
[00:02:59]  It's not every third one.
[00:03:00]  There's a weird kind of a pattern there.
[00:03:02]  It's very variable.
[00:03:03]  I've got some thinking I've done about it, but I don't know for sure.
[00:03:06]  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.
[00:03:18]  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.
[00:03:22]  And we'll do a couple more searches for AdWords and see if it can show up.
[00:03:25]  I'd like to show it to somebody and then show that we don't normally see it.
[00:03:30]  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.
[00:03:36]  It's really phenomenally successful.
[00:03:38]  It's on Twitter.
[00:03:39]  I love Twitter.
[00:03:40]  Twitter is real time.
[00:03:42]  People give Twitter all kinds of grief and they shouldn't.
[00:03:44]  They just don't understand Twitter.
[00:03:46]  I mean, in terms of advertisers, they don't like Twitter because they don't understand it.
[00:03:49]  They don't know how to make it perform.
[00:03:51]  But my approach really did make it perform.
[00:03:53]  I was putting in $15.26 worth of ad cost on Twitter to get $693 in sales.
[00:04:00]  And that was consistently holding.
[00:04:02]  In fact, I could do better than that on some other advertising keywords.
[00:04:06]  That's what I have to start using now instead of the word AdWords.
[00:04:09]  Apologies to Google.
[00:04:10]  I did not know it was trademarked.
[00:04:12]  So in using advertising keywords and developing an advertising campaign on Twitter, I was doing very good.
[00:04:18]  I had a response that had 5,160% return on investment at one point.
[00:04:26]  And then last night I go to check my ads, as is my habit after doing my work on my reports and stuff.
[00:04:33]  I go to do the housekeeping work.
[00:04:35]  And so I went to check my ads and there's this big giant red banner saying basically you screwed up.
[00:04:41]  And it was on Twitter and they were saying you can't advertise anymore because you've been a bad boy.
[00:04:45]  And then they gave me some hints in a general sense as to what my offense might have been.
[00:04:52]  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.
[00:05:02]  And I am sense of the opinion, probably not.
[00:05:05]  No one's actually told me what my offense was.
[00:05:07]  I've sent in a help ticket asking to have it explicitly explained to me.
[00:05:12]  I'm pretty sure it was using AdWords, and I'm pretty sure Google complained to Twitter.
[00:05:17]  And had I been Google, I would have bitched too.
[00:05:20]  Now, I'm just a different kind of a guy.
[00:05:22]  They're a corporation.
[00:05:23]  They can't do things that way.
[00:05:24]  If it had been me, I would have called me and I would have corrected it because I'm a nice guy, right?
[00:05:29]  I'm not trying to scam them or anything.
[00:05:30]  I did this in ignorance.
[00:05:31]  I did not know.
[00:05:32]  And in fact, they contributed.
[00:05:34]  They helped me not know.
[00:05:36]  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.
[00:05:43]  Redid the website, redid the web page, redid the book.
[00:05:46]  You know, with universal search and replace, it's not that big of a deal.
[00:05:51]  So the book's being translated now by some friends of mine in German and Spanish.
[00:05:56]  I've addressed that.
[00:05:57]  I took down all of my videos off of YouTube that used that term.
[00:06:02]  I need to remake these videos on how to use the product, but I won't be using AdWords.
[00:06:07]  Sorry about that.
[00:06:08]  Dust all over and I've been cleaning up.
[00:06:12]  So anyway, we're at a situation where, or at a point here, where my ads have been stopped by Twitter.
[00:06:18]  I want to continue them.
[00:06:19]  I've redone everything.
[00:06:21]  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.
[00:06:28]  I'm assuming that they're in the middle, and I'm assuming as well that Google is on the other side.

=== Let Us Clarify (03:07) ===

[00:06:33]  And I didn't want to piss off Google.
[00:06:34]  I've got no problems with them.
[00:06:35]  I like them.
[00:06:36]  They're good guys.
[00:06:37]  You know, I feel for them.
[00:06:39]  They're drowning in data.
[00:06:42]  And, you know, they're running as hard as they can.
[00:06:44]  And the data mountain keeps growing faster than they can search the thing.
[00:06:47]  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.
[00:06:56]  Anyway, so like I say, I apologize to Google.
[00:06:58]  I did this inadvertently and I did do my due diligence though.
[00:07:03]  And your own site does not show the trademark claim.
[00:07:08]  Therefore, I assumed it was, you guys used it the same way I do as a generic term, you know, like facial tissue, right?
[00:07:15]  As opposed to a brand name, Scott's or Kleenex or something.
[00:07:19]  But I didn't know it was a brand name.
[00:07:22]  Again, I apologize.
[00:07:23]  I've corrected the offense.
[00:07:25]  I would not have done it had I known.
[00:07:27]  And I would not have done it had Google not contributed to the situation by not having it on their site consistently.
[00:07:33]  So now let's zoom in and have a quick look and then everybody can get back to their day.
[00:07:38]  This is just kind of a weird situation.
[00:07:41]  Let me see if I can get at that.
[00:07:51]  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.
[00:08:05]  So I'm going to focus the camera.
[00:08:06]  Let's get our search there.
[00:08:09]  Okay, so now I'm going to, oops.
[00:08:16]  I'm sorry, guys.
[00:08:16]  I'm just not very good at all this video crap yet.
[00:08:26]  Okay.
[00:08:28]  There we go.
[00:08:30]  So you see right off on top, there's no trademark symbol near AdWords.
[00:08:34]  I've actually found it in one of their ads where it does show up.
[00:08:38]  Let me reinitiate, redid the ads.
[00:08:42]  There's no trademark symbol anywhere the word AdWords appears.
[00:08:48]  And I'm going to back it out a little bit here so you see a bit more of the whole screen.
[00:08:54]  And you'll see, I mean, I'm touching each and every one of these.
[00:08:56]  There's simply no trademark symbol in there.
[00:09:00]  I'll run the thing again.
[00:09:03]  Again, it's not, there's no trademark.
[00:09:07]  So at this stage, I mean, I can repeat that query pretty much indefinitely.
[00:09:14]  I was able to run a Perl script and had it pop off a bunch.
[00:09:19]  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.

=== Can't Trust Search (00:46) ===

[00:09:35]  This was running it last night.
[00:09:37]  So like I say, there you go.
[00:09:40]  That's the story of how I pissed off Google.
[00:09:42]  Didn't mean to.
[00:09:43]  It was my fault.
[00:09:44]  I shouldn't have done it.
[00:09:45]  And they should not have let me do it.
[00:09:48]  No, I'm not copying that.
[00:09:50]  I'm not saying it wasn't my fault.
[00:09:52]  And I have indeed corrected it all.
[00:09:55]  But interesting, you can't trust search.
[00:09:59]  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.
[00:10:06]  I guess that's the lesson.
[00:10:08]  Thank you much for watching.