The unparalleled advance of the Internet in the modern era has lead to vast new opportunities for marketers in the digital realm. The fusion of information technology and access to the Internet has acted as a catalyst for software based algorithms which purport to closely match online media content to highly targeted advertising. The adoption of cookie-based tracking technologies combined with internet protocol address geotargeting has allowed online advertising to be refined to such a degree that relevant and accurate advertising can be matched to any content that any particular Internet user is viewing at any particular time.
Evidently, an important facet of this technology is the critical reliance of text based inputs in order to interpret and decipher the particular content being viewed. The fundamental dependence on text interpretation by advertising algorithms has lead to significant judicial confusion regarding the permitted use and manipulation of such text in the context of trademarked terms. The conflicting legal paradigm is the apparent statutory authority provided by trademark legislation which purports to provide the registered owner of a trademark exclusive rights over a sign for the goods and/or services in which it is registered — against the use of such a mark by advertising systems as a contextual input driver in order to accurately correlate the most appropriate advertising content to the inputted term. To further complicate this paradigm, the usage of trademark terms must be categorised into two distinct and separate groupings — those terms which are driven by direct user-input — entered into search engine interfaces which then render search results correlated with relevant search advertising — and those that are automatically extracted by advertising systems from the web page meta data layer.
This latter category usually couples a machine algorithmic approach with human assisted text identification — commonly referred to as meta tagging — for the purposes of enhanced content interpretation which augments the advertising matching process.
