Look at How Clever We Are!

It seems the folks who lie about free shipping and can't tell the difference between "cakes" and "cake" thought it would be cute to buy our domain name in AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Either that or they thought it would be some brilliant new marketing concept, as follows:

IDIOT 1
They're one of the most popular sites for cakes. Let's buy their domain name.

IDIOT 2
Wow! What a great idea! When's the IPO? We're gonna be rich!

Of course, the single-cake site trying to compete with us is like Woot! trying to compete with BestBuy, with one major exception: Woot! runs a different product every day and delivers some amazing values to its customers. The single-cake site offers...well...a cake...and some kind of e-mail thing, which is probably a terrific value if you're one of the five people who's online but doesn't have e-mail.

To say I was annoyed when I saw them coming up for my domain name would be accurate. To say I was annoyed enough to complain about Google, Yahoo!, and MSN yesterday would be entirely accurate. To the credit of all three of those companies, Google got the problem fixed within a day--and sent a nice e-mail explaining that things were busy--and Yahoo! and MSN set a new processing speed record by having my ads up in less than 24 hours. I'm impressed with all of you, but Yahoo!'s interface still needs a major redesign.

The reason I was annoyed is because decent people don't buy their competitors' brand name. Chevy doesn't buy Ford. Wal-Mart doesn't buy Sears. Hershey doesn't buy Godiva. Partly its a matter of being polite, and partly its a matter of not wasting marketing dollars. If a customer is searching for Chevy, they probably don't want to hear Ford's sales pitch. That customer is searching for the brand, not generically trolling for a car. Inserting your ads at that point is at best confusing and at worst a deliberate deception.

So the single-cake site forced my hand, and I bought the domain name and its variations as a keyword. And because I think turnabout is fair play, I bought their domain name as a keyword too. The funny thing is, once my ads appeared, theirs vanished.

I suppose it's only fair, and far less hypocritical of me, to stop advertising on their domain name. As I look at my schedule, I can see a lot of work that needs to get done. Add in the processing time for Yahoo! and MSN...and the ads should be gone by this time next week. Which, coincidentally, is how long they were squatting in our space.

I think I caught USABIrthdays hanging around in there too. For the record, guys, I refer our customers to you when they ask for something that we don't have. I'd like to continue doing that, but only if you play nice.

And as for you, shopping.com, you know full well that we don't sell through your site, although some of our AdWords campaigns appear there. You're buying our domain on a technicality, and if needed, I'll be happy to point out how we're beating your prices.