Steering Clear of Marketing Traps Around Milestone Events

If you are in the marketing/advertising business, your success depends largely on coming up with innovative new ways to promote a customer's product or event offering.  Thus, when a milestone event arises in the sports, music, or film worlds, you may be inspired to try to capitalize on those events by tying your marketing efforts to the milestone event.

There is only one problem: the names and marks associated with those milestone events are likely protected trademarks.  Thus, if you launch a marketing campaign without first procuring the necessary license from the trademark owner to use the trademarks, you will likely be the recipient of a stern cease and desist letter. . . .or worse.

What kinds of marks am I talking about?  Marks surrounding awards events and sport events are just some of the major events that come to mind that likely have a number of registered trademarks protecting the use of the names.   I recall, for example, not too long ago that a client came to me with a cease and desist letter regarding the alleged use of the word "Grammy" in conjunction with a publicized party.   According to attorney Gonzalo Mon who recently wrote an article on this issue, he has clients contemplating the use of ring-based marks and reference-based marks to the Olympics right now, any of which could be problematic if the client is not an official sponsor of such event specifically authorized to use the marks in question.  While I know from my own practice that marketing professionals have a tendency to grab and use third party marks without giving much consideration to whether or not they have the right to do so, and they often fly under the radar screen in engaging in such actions, it is not an advisable practice and it may catch a third party's attention, particularly where the third party is charging a premium rate for the use of that mark.

So, as we come up on milestone events, if you are inspired with a great marketing or advertising idea, you should always assume that the marks surrounding such an event are going to be protected and engage in some research before making use of a event-related mark or mark that might be confusingly similar to an event-related mark.  How do you confirm that this is the case?  Well, a simple search of the USPTO database for the name of the event in question would be a good starting point for your research.  While you can absolutely run a question like this by a trademark attorney, searching the USPTO database does not require legal credentials, and I encourage all my clients to learn how to run searches themselves, as it is an easy skill to learn as a non-lawyer.  Typing in the word "Olympics" for example, brings up a long list of marks, and should alert you fairly quickly to the fact that there are in fact registered trademarks surrounding the event in question that you need to be aware of.  The same type of search should work for other events.

Of course, even if there are no federal trademarks in place surrounding a particular event mark, there still may be common law rights in a trademark that you might be infringing on if you use the mark without first obtaining a license, so just because your search of the database is clear, does not mean that you are free to use a particular mark.  Also, you should remember that the database only searches U.S. trademarks, so there are trademarks all around the world that potentially could be a problem if the mark in question may have a worldwide platform.

The  bottom line is that you should be cautious in marketing around events to ensure that you stay clear of legal problems in conjunction with those events.  The success you achieve with such a marketing campaign could easily backfire and result in legal woes that far outweigh any benefits you received from your marketing efforts.