The trademark-use agreements are struck between franchisee and franchiser, and search engines can’t be asked to scrutinize those. If a franchise sits on it’s ass and doesn’t enable modern marketing techniques, it’s really just tough cookies for the franchisee. Google and others will use the federal law default and call it a day.

I have learned that franchises have to assume the worst in cases like this, and there is wisdom in it. In many <$1m franchises, IMO, many (most?) of the people buying into these *should not* be running *any* business, and there’s a real danger of knee jerk web marketing which can disrupt national efforts.

It would be nice to think the web development / agency crowd would come to the rescue, but it doesn’t always happen. I’ve seen local web design companies buy a national, broad-match PPC ad for a strictly local market at least five times.

Internet-based advertising such as geotargeted PPC could be discussed like print marketing. This is imperfect as well, as geotargeting is horribly inaccurate at the zip code level. I’ve worked with franchises to solve this by developing (with much pain) “metro hub” landing pages which share paid search costs by region. The PPC targeting gets them close, and the hub page goes the final mile.

I think that it will change if potential franchisees begin asking about it during the sales process. If enough people ask the question “What about PPC trademark usage” as a part of due diligence, franchisers will be compelled to decide what they want to do, and add language in agreements.

On my desk right now is a tangled mess of paperwork where a franchisee filed a trademark complaint against another PPC advertiser with Google on their own rather than asking the franchiser to do it. Google did the right thing by rejecting the complaint, and the legal department of the franchiser is now handling the issue. It just shows you how fd up it can get.

BTW: A similar issue arises with domain names. Someday, perhaps, a niche registrar will emerge which is sensitive to these needs.