There was a time when Google disallowed this. Google even asked us (Firefox team) to report ads squatting on our trademarks. Eventually they stopped caring and now it's in their ad sales pitchdeck just how effective trademark squatting can be.
I feel like there’s at least some country in the world where the legal regime would be amenable to ruling against Google if they were taken to court over trademark squatting by the trademark holders.
In Argentina it is illegal (since the nineties) to mention other brands.
So a Coca Cola ad cannot reference Pepsi. Laundry detergents can not make references to other brands, so they say “better than other generic brands” without names or hinting any in particular.
I suppose the exact wording is important here, but this practice sound dangerously close to violating this restriction.
"other generic brands" is pretty standard ad verbiage in all countries AFAIK. Even when there's no specific law, if you mention another brand by name, you open yourself up to a defamation lawsuit.
I had the parent comment, not the one you're directly replying to... but that actually seems a bit odd to me.
Clearly if you're not an advertiser, you can call out brands by name for having junky products (e.g. "The Worst Air Purifier We’ve Ever Tested" by Wirecutter on the Molekule air purifier). Similarly clearly, if you're an advertiser, you'll fall afoul of laws around false advertising if you tell non-truths in ads.
I expect that the reason Honeywell or Coway aren't punching down on Molekule in their ads isn't that they're afraid of lawsuits more than the Wirecutter, it's simply that their ads are meant to build their own brand awareness so they don't want to name any other brands.
Can you in principle sue people buying these ads for trademark infringement? (I realize in practice the answer is that it's not worth the game of whack-a-mole.)
The trademark infringement is when their ad includes someone else's trademark.
Look at the screenshot in this post. All four of the ads at the top of the search results include the trademarked name "Midjourney" in the title of the ad.
This is more like putting up a giant sign outside of your Honda dealership saying "Best deals on new VWs!" but when you pull in they don't sell VWs, they sell their own competing products.
Some players circumvent this by creating "blog posts" where they compare/about multiple tools. Like it is a fair use but in reality is an ad in disguise.
