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> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement. > Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it do

> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement. > Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees. This is a particularly egregious sleight of hand. It's a relatively easy click-through to write for DoorDash, and it would result in the customer getting exactly what they were looking for (instantly looking at Saddleback's menu options and probably ordering). But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash.

majormajor 6y ago
This is confusing because it goes against everything the marketing folks in previous jobs were always pushing on our front end engineering and SEO efforts. I'm more suspicious of landing page incompetence then you. Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind. The DoorDash approach seems very backward. If I saw that landing page I'd be inclined to think "wow, these people don't actually have Saddleback, let me check somewhere else." I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  > Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind. That's if you're trying to sell them the thing they showed interest in. Door Dash et al aren't trying to sell you Saddleback Barbecue, they're trying to get you onto their platform so they can sell you to advertisers. What you're interested in is just a way for them to manipulate you onto their platform.
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    Yes, but per the above post, what tends to work best is if you present people with the shortest path to what they want, and with up sell/retention opportunities either in that path or in follow up after successful conversion. I guarantee you that a custom landing page for these campaigns would work out better for them.
    - jiofih 6y ago
      Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.
      - uoaei 6y ago
        Folks are slowly noticing that this concept of "engagement" is a shallow, toxic one that encourages poor behavior that generally harms the end user.
        RussianCow 6y ago
        [citation needed] Maybe tech-savvy folks, or people otherwise paying close attention, but I don't think this describes the vast majority of people by any stretch.
        uoaei 6y ago
        I think the discussion around Facebook and Russia opened a lot of eyes to how ads-based businesses can be exploited, and how the infrastructure they built directly lends to this phenomenon.
        RussianCow 6y ago
        And yet, people still continue to use Facebook/Google/etc en masse. These companies are in the news what seems like every week, but the number of people who have left those platforms is negligible.
- uremog 6y ago
  With how poor delivery services coverage in my area is, if I look for Saddleback and don't find it soon, I'm probably uninstalling because they won't have anything else I'm looking for. Might install again next year to see if it's better.
- calbear81 6y ago
  This is either dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy or they did target a specific restaurant name but decided to use a more generic landing page. In my previous life doing more marketing oriented activities in the travel space, we found that even if someone was looking for a very specific hotel, if you dropped them on that page, it converted at a lower rate than dropping them into a search page for hotels in that location and "pinning" that hotel to the top of the page. The reason is that people may be more open to other similar options than you think. So in the case of Doordash, perhaps they have found a similar thing which is that you might have said McDonald's but net net more people will buy if you show them McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack-in-Box, etc. Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    So if someone was searching for Hilton would you drop them on a page with Motel 6 pinned at the top if they paid you some money? With Hilton nowhere on the page? That's what's being claimed in the original comment here. That's what feels like incompetence (or, more likely, a "targeted landing pages" project that just hasn't been very prioritized).
    - calbear81 6y ago
      Yes, it's most likely that the ad that's matching is the generic one for "Lansing, MI BBQ" or something to that effect and therefore it's not pointing to a specific landing page. It may also be that Doordash has found that individual restaurant keywords that point to specific restaurant pages are just not profitable.
- jasonlingx 6y ago
  You had different marketing goals. This is like why shops put milk way in the back.
- masonic 6y ago
  I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant More to the point, you and I both come away with a negative impression of Applebee's as well (if we didn't have one already).
deleted 6y ago
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cbsmith 6y ago
I do think this is something that Google could be smarter about mitigating. In the longer term picture, higher conversion rates advertisers will spend more on Google AdWords budgets, so an ad that drives right to the restaurant people wanted should be a net win. I think the larger problem here is that DoorDash & GrubHub are better positioned to pay a higher customer acquisition cost (better capitalized, higher margin businesses long term, and also more drive to create brand awareness in this moment), since they can convert for people who want alternatives to whatever they searched for, and on top of that they can more easily justify investing in tuning their marketing campaigns. So from Google's perspective, it may be hard to perceive a strategic advantage of fixing this. What is surprising to me is that investing in tuning their marketing campaigns hasn't resulted in developing custom landing pages for those campaigns that, for example, might put people on a page for the restaurant in question (maybe with a sidebar for "looking for alternatives?"). That'd no doubt improve effective CPA for their campaigns.
- cat199 6y ago
  > so an ad that drives right to the restaurant people wanted should be a net win. a system that generates the maximum amount of monetizable events without frustrating the user or advertiser towards other platforms is the 'net win' from the ad platfrom perspective
pcurve 6y ago
I don’t see how this is even legal tbh
- e_y_ 6y ago
  It would not surprise me if "we can use your brand for advertising" is explicitly mentioned in the GrubHub/DoorDash contracts. I think the overall problem is that restaurants don't have much leverage; their main option is to refuse to cooperate. Now the (gradually becoming less common) practice of auto-creating order pages for restaurants that didn't agree to be a partner, I would agree should be totally illegal, or at least needs a very large disclaimer that the restaurant is not involved.
- wffurr 6y ago
  I would guess the DoorDash contract that the restaurant signed explicitly gives DoorDash permission to do this. They even probably think it's a service, run Google ads for mom & pops so they don't have to. The recourse is exactly what the author of the article is considering; cancel the DoorDash contract.
  - basch 6y ago
    these vertically integrated proprietary institutions need to be broken up. they cause competition in the wrong way, by forcing restaurants to sign up for all of them, and juggle multiple, competing, non-compatible infrastructures. its a different kind of anti-trust that creates an arms race, the necessity to invest in all the oligopoly's participants or be left behind by those that do. its like a weird hostage situation, where multiple people can hold you hostage simultanious.y the online menu needs to be separate from the pos that receives the order, the request for dispatch to the delivery driver should be another component, and the online marketing another, allowing the restaurant and delivery driver to mix and match. at a minimum the advertising+menu+order placement should be broken up from the on site order processing+delivery. And with regard to the roads, there shouldnt be a bitesquad, uber eats, grubhub, postmates, and doordash delivery driver waiting in the lobby at the same time all driving to the same neighborhood. theres obviously better ways to load balance and distribute the tasks, than by which company submitted the order.
dathinab 6y ago
> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement. > Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees. Well isn't that plain fraud? (And no adding some * somewhere with a disclaimer doesn't make it not fraud. The point is that it intentionally misguides/tricks/manipulates the user with the intention of harming the given brand (by on-the-fly replacing it)). EDIT(clarification): It's like going into a shop and asking for a specific samsung tv and the salesman goes and comes back with a philipps tv saying here is your tv, the price is .... Sure if you look clearly at it it's not the PC you asked for but if you are in a hurry or social insecure you might still end up buying it even through you didn't want to.
- smacktoward 6y ago
  I dunno about fraud, but it certainly seems reasonable that it would be trademark infringement. The name "Saddleback BBQ" is Saddleback's trademark. If another company uses it to sell potential Saddleback customers (which these clearly are, since they searched for that name) products from a competitor, that seems like something a good trademark attorney would be interested in. (The potential hitch here is that most restaurants are small businesses, and small businesses aren't great about doing things like registering their trademarks. But you can still build a claim even around an unregistered trademark under certain circumstances: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-good-unregistered-trademark.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-good-unregister...)
  - stefan_ 6y ago
    Amazon has been sued successfully for this very scenario. They put up Google ads for "Ortlieb bags" then showed you generic bike bags.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    A trademark doesn't mean no one can use your name. You would need to prove that customers are being misled to purchase BBQ from another company thinking they are getting it from Saddleback BBQ. You can call out competitors, you can create an ad that says "4 out of 5 doctors prefer our BBQ to Saddleback BBQ" (assuming you've got the data to back it up). What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting Saddleback BBQ. It would be like mentioning a popular brand on your website in order to get the search engine traffic for that brand, even though you don't sell it.
eloff 6y ago
Is this even legal? Can a competitor use your trademark in their advertisement without permission? I don't see how this would qualify for fair use exclusions. I'm not a lawyer, but this is failing a smell test for me.
- gamegod 6y ago
  I know when I try to use my competitors trademarks in my Google Adwords, Google rejects my ads every time. It's typical Google bullshit that DoorDash gets a free pass here.
- pdonis 6y ago
  The article says DoorDash charges restaurants an advertising fee. I would assume that includes a contractual agreement that allows DoorDash to use restaurant trademarks in their advertising.
  - throwaway17_17 6y ago
    I don’t know how I feel about the ‘moral’ aspect of the practice, but I can be almost certain you are correct.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > I don’t know how I feel about the ‘moral’ aspect of the practice I'm not happy with it; their behavior is clearly not acting in good faith, even if on paper they have some contractual language that gives them a legal defense if challenged.
  - skny 6y ago
    Doordash lists every restaurant they deem worthy of delivery in a particular area - the restaurant doesn't have to be part of a contractual agreement with them. They call this OTT (Over the Top) where the courier orders the food like a normal patron and gets the food to the customer. In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do. If they are not, I would think that there is an extremely strong legal case for copyright infringement, especially since Doordash is not even working to generate revenue for the restaurant, but redirecting you to a generic bbq restaurants page.
TuringNYC 6y ago
I had this happen with Hotels.com where they presented an 800 number for a hotel -- the person answering the call presented himself as the Hotel's registration desk. The entire time they are telling me this and that corporate discount code isnt available. Until I asked some key question and realized they were a 3rd party trying to book you at top-rates. I NEVER use Hotels.com for this reason, it is meant to extract as much as possible and take away the pricing power from the hotel.
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ubermonkey 6y ago
Yelp's been doing that bullshit for years.
foxly 6y ago
Why not create your own Google ad for your restaurant and point it directly to your website. With doordash likely doing this for millions of restaurants, it can’t possibly cost more than a few cents per customer to outbid them.
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cactus2093 6y ago
> But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! This is one of the most depressing parts about working in tech for me. Basically no company is content with making a good product (for some definition of what that even means, that phrase itself is obviously subjective). Ideally a site/app is solving a real problem for their users, and they could make a simple, clear, and consistent interface that exposes that solution and trust the user to make the best use of it to address their need. Unfortunately that never seems to be enough. Even for companies that I genuinely believe have good motives (trying to provide real value rather than trick people into buying snake oil), they also need to sell it. They track conversion metrics and then they need to optimize their flows, which inevitably makes things more complex and more obfuscated. Basically every PM or product-focused founder I've worked with is thinking about how to push the user to where they want them, rather than how to make things clear so the user can choose what they want to do. It's the behavioral economics idea of nudging run completely off the rails. The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly. And your competitors are doing this stuff too, so they'll eat your lunch if you're not good at growth, marketing, and optimizing conversions. It's similar to how I've never encountered a product person who takes the spirit of things like GDPR seriously. It's do or die and if you try to do things like respect users' privacy on principle instead of do everything you can to optimize conversions, you'll lose. I've come to accept that there doesn't seem to be any way around it, this is the cost we pay for the tech products we use (and, contrary to perhaps a lot of others on HN, I do really believe that a lot of these services are genuinely useful in my life, and it's still worth it to me to use them despite this sad reality).
- techsupporter 6y ago
  > The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly. Someone will inevitably come along and claim this is how capitalism works, survival of the fittest, ruthlessly efficient markets, and all of that. Which, of course, is entirely reasonable if that "assume a perfect sphere on a frictionless plane alongside a perfectly rational actor" model of economics actually existed in the real world. It doesn't. At the risk of sounding like I am moralizing, which I am but not in a negative or peacocking way, this is why I work to optimize my choices deliberately against financial gain and towards things like my community, my environment, and my society. I buy from companies that, best I can tell, pay their workers reasonably and act responsibly. I have walked away from projects at my employer--and, once, threatened to leave my employer (along with several of my coworkers) if my group insisted on proceeding down a path that it, happily, abandoned. I deliberately don't own a car, order from delivery services, or shop at Wal-Mart. Why? Because while individual actions make a very little impact, setting the example for those actions gives others both the courage and the cover to take them alongside me. I can't sit idly by and wait for "the group" to do something, even to my own financial detriment[0]. Make no mistake, I work in tech like a lot of us on HN--though I am not a software developer so perhaps not as well off as many but still doing fantastically well compared to the most--so I am coming at this from a position of privilege and have a very long way to fall before I hit bottom. Most of us do, which is why it is incumbent upon us to make decisions not solely in pursuit of money and to translate that into our businesses and, frankly, if the shareholders don't like it then they can say so while I'm converting my corporate format to a SPC. 0 - "Detriment" here meaning that I'm spending slightly more than I "should" if I optimized output solely for cost and making slightly less than I "should" if I optimized input solely for gains.
jsonne 6y ago
I run quite a lot of Google search ads. To the tune of multiples of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. There's a small distinction I want to make here. It is not only allowed, but common, to bid on the name of a competitor. What you can not do is use their name in their ads. If I had to guess what's going on here is that at the scale DoorDash is at they're almost certainly utilizing dynamic keyword insertion where it grabs your search query and inserts it into your ad text. This is probably just an oversight honestly. I highly doubt there's some advertisers menacingly rubbing their hands together and cackling as they type in "saddleback bbq" into the ad copy. This is probably just an oversight on Google's part tbh. Edit: I believe that you can stop this to some degree also by registering your trademarks with Google. Here's their ads policy. https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
- Avicebron 6y ago
  I agree, this seems to be an automated form of clickbait. It's not necessarily malicious, but an increase in the arms race for clicks and purchases. It's been like this on Youtube for years.
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- otterley 6y ago
  Quoting their policy: "Ads may use the trademark in ad text if they meet the following requirements: "Resellers: The ad's landing page is primarily dedicated to selling (or clearly facilitating the sale of) products or services, components, replacement parts, or compatible products or services corresponding to the trademark. The landing page must clearly provide a way to purchase the products or services or display commercial information about them, such as rates or prices." If I were a delivery service, I would argue that my business operates as a reseller of the restaurant's offerings and that my use of the trademark is permitted per this clause of the policy.
helen___keller 6y ago
> The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash. I'm not sure I buy it. I work for one of the delivery companies, and small locally owned merchants give better margins and more profit compared to these giant chains who can negotiate really low commissions. On top of that, you risk losing the customer because you have to keep them interested. They were literally looking to order food and you brought them back to the 'browsing around' stage. Is that actually a good idea? I'm not so sure.
pmoriarty 6y ago
For those arguing in favor of this madness, think of how you'd feel if you typed in google.com in to your web browser or clicked on a Google link or selected a Google bookmark and instead of taking you to the google.com website the browser took you to a list of websites with Duck Duck Go at the top. You could switch the sites two around, or substitute any other web sites and have the same problem. Or how about if you try to vote Democrat and instead of registering your vote you are shown a list of non-Democratic candidates with Republicans at the top? Or vice versa.. If you're in favor of the one, you should be in favor of the other. To argue in favor of this is to argue for less consumer choice and power.

majormajor 6y ago

This is confusing because it goes against everything the marketing folks in previous jobs were always pushing on our front end engineering and SEO efforts. I'm more suspicious of landing page incompetence then you. Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind. The DoorDash approach seems very backward. If I saw that landing page I'd be inclined to think "wow, these people don't actually have Saddleback, let me check somewhere else." I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant.

kerkeslager 6y ago
> Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind. That's if you're trying to sell them the thing they showed interest in. Door Dash et al aren't trying to sell you Saddleback Barbecue, they're trying to get you onto their platform so they can sell you to advertisers. What you're interested in is just a way for them to manipulate you onto their platform.
- cbsmith 6y ago
  Yes, but per the above post, what tends to work best is if you present people with the shortest path to what they want, and with up sell/retention opportunities either in that path or in follow up after successful conversion. I guarantee you that a custom landing page for these campaigns would work out better for them.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.
    - uoaei 6y ago
      Folks are slowly noticing that this concept of "engagement" is a shallow, toxic one that encourages poor behavior that generally harms the end user.
      - RussianCow 6y ago
        [citation needed] Maybe tech-savvy folks, or people otherwise paying close attention, but I don't think this describes the vast majority of people by any stretch.
        uoaei 6y ago
        I think the discussion around Facebook and Russia opened a lot of eyes to how ads-based businesses can be exploited, and how the infrastructure they built directly lends to this phenomenon.
        RussianCow 6y ago
        And yet, people still continue to use Facebook/Google/etc en masse. These companies are in the news what seems like every week, but the number of people who have left those platforms is negligible.
uremog 6y ago
With how poor delivery services coverage in my area is, if I look for Saddleback and don't find it soon, I'm probably uninstalling because they won't have anything else I'm looking for. Might install again next year to see if it's better.
calbear81 6y ago
This is either dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy or they did target a specific restaurant name but decided to use a more generic landing page. In my previous life doing more marketing oriented activities in the travel space, we found that even if someone was looking for a very specific hotel, if you dropped them on that page, it converted at a lower rate than dropping them into a search page for hotels in that location and "pinning" that hotel to the top of the page. The reason is that people may be more open to other similar options than you think. So in the case of Doordash, perhaps they have found a similar thing which is that you might have said McDonald's but net net more people will buy if you show them McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack-in-Box, etc. Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.
- majormajor 6y ago
  So if someone was searching for Hilton would you drop them on a page with Motel 6 pinned at the top if they paid you some money? With Hilton nowhere on the page? That's what's being claimed in the original comment here. That's what feels like incompetence (or, more likely, a "targeted landing pages" project that just hasn't been very prioritized).
  - calbear81 6y ago
    Yes, it's most likely that the ad that's matching is the generic one for "Lansing, MI BBQ" or something to that effect and therefore it's not pointing to a specific landing page. It may also be that Doordash has found that individual restaurant keywords that point to specific restaurant pages are just not profitable.
jasonlingx 6y ago
You had different marketing goals. This is like why shops put milk way in the back.
masonic 6y ago
I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant More to the point, you and I both come away with a negative impression of Applebee's as well (if we didn't have one already).

deleted 6y ago

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cbsmith 6y ago

I do think this is something that Google could be smarter about mitigating. In the longer term picture, higher conversion rates advertisers will spend more on Google AdWords budgets, so an ad that drives right to the restaurant people wanted should be a net win. I think the larger problem here is that DoorDash & GrubHub are better positioned to pay a higher customer acquisition cost (better capitalized, higher margin businesses long term, and also more drive to create brand awareness in this moment), since they can convert for people who want alternatives to whatever they searched for, and on top of that they can more easily justify investing in tuning their marketing campaigns. So from Google's perspective, it may be hard to perceive a strategic advantage of fixing this. What is surprising to me is that investing in tuning their marketing campaigns hasn't resulted in developing custom landing pages for those campaigns that, for example, might put people on a page for the restaurant in question (maybe with a sidebar for "looking for alternatives?"). That'd no doubt improve effective CPA for their campaigns.

cat199 6y ago
> so an ad that drives right to the restaurant people wanted should be a net win. a system that generates the maximum amount of monetizable events without frustrating the user or advertiser towards other platforms is the 'net win' from the ad platfrom perspective

pcurve 6y ago

I don’t see how this is even legal tbh

e_y_ 6y ago
It would not surprise me if "we can use your brand for advertising" is explicitly mentioned in the GrubHub/DoorDash contracts. I think the overall problem is that restaurants don't have much leverage; their main option is to refuse to cooperate. Now the (gradually becoming less common) practice of auto-creating order pages for restaurants that didn't agree to be a partner, I would agree should be totally illegal, or at least needs a very large disclaimer that the restaurant is not involved.
wffurr 6y ago
I would guess the DoorDash contract that the restaurant signed explicitly gives DoorDash permission to do this. They even probably think it's a service, run Google ads for mom & pops so they don't have to. The recourse is exactly what the author of the article is considering; cancel the DoorDash contract.
- basch 6y ago
  these vertically integrated proprietary institutions need to be broken up. they cause competition in the wrong way, by forcing restaurants to sign up for all of them, and juggle multiple, competing, non-compatible infrastructures. its a different kind of anti-trust that creates an arms race, the necessity to invest in all the oligopoly's participants or be left behind by those that do. its like a weird hostage situation, where multiple people can hold you hostage simultanious.y the online menu needs to be separate from the pos that receives the order, the request for dispatch to the delivery driver should be another component, and the online marketing another, allowing the restaurant and delivery driver to mix and match. at a minimum the advertising+menu+order placement should be broken up from the on site order processing+delivery. And with regard to the roads, there shouldnt be a bitesquad, uber eats, grubhub, postmates, and doordash delivery driver waiting in the lobby at the same time all driving to the same neighborhood. theres obviously better ways to load balance and distribute the tasks, than by which company submitted the order.

dathinab 6y ago

> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement. > Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees. Well isn't that plain fraud? (And no adding some * somewhere with a disclaimer doesn't make it not fraud. The point is that it intentionally misguides/tricks/manipulates the user with the intention of harming the given brand (by on-the-fly replacing it)). EDIT(clarification): It's like going into a shop and asking for a specific samsung tv and the salesman goes and comes back with a philipps tv saying here is your tv, the price is .... Sure if you look clearly at it it's not the PC you asked for but if you are in a hurry or social insecure you might still end up buying it even through you didn't want to.

smacktoward 6y ago
I dunno about fraud, but it certainly seems reasonable that it would be trademark infringement. The name "Saddleback BBQ" is Saddleback's trademark. If another company uses it to sell potential Saddleback customers (which these clearly are, since they searched for that name) products from a competitor, that seems like something a good trademark attorney would be interested in. (The potential hitch here is that most restaurants are small businesses, and small businesses aren't great about doing things like registering their trademarks. But you can still build a claim even around an unregistered trademark under certain circumstances: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-good-unregistered-trademark.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-good-unregister...)
- stefan_ 6y ago
  Amazon has been sued successfully for this very scenario. They put up Google ads for "Ortlieb bags" then showed you generic bike bags.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  A trademark doesn't mean no one can use your name. You would need to prove that customers are being misled to purchase BBQ from another company thinking they are getting it from Saddleback BBQ. You can call out competitors, you can create an ad that says "4 out of 5 doctors prefer our BBQ to Saddleback BBQ" (assuming you've got the data to back it up). What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting Saddleback BBQ. It would be like mentioning a popular brand on your website in order to get the search engine traffic for that brand, even though you don't sell it.

eloff 6y ago

Is this even legal? Can a competitor use your trademark in their advertisement without permission? I don't see how this would qualify for fair use exclusions. I'm not a lawyer, but this is failing a smell test for me.

gamegod 6y ago
I know when I try to use my competitors trademarks in my Google Adwords, Google rejects my ads every time. It's typical Google bullshit that DoorDash gets a free pass here.
pdonis 6y ago
The article says DoorDash charges restaurants an advertising fee. I would assume that includes a contractual agreement that allows DoorDash to use restaurant trademarks in their advertising.
- throwaway17_17 6y ago
  I don’t know how I feel about the ‘moral’ aspect of the practice, but I can be almost certain you are correct.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > I don’t know how I feel about the ‘moral’ aspect of the practice I'm not happy with it; their behavior is clearly not acting in good faith, even if on paper they have some contractual language that gives them a legal defense if challenged.
- skny 6y ago
  Doordash lists every restaurant they deem worthy of delivery in a particular area - the restaurant doesn't have to be part of a contractual agreement with them. They call this OTT (Over the Top) where the courier orders the food like a normal patron and gets the food to the customer. In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do. If they are not, I would think that there is an extremely strong legal case for copyright infringement, especially since Doordash is not even working to generate revenue for the restaurant, but redirecting you to a generic bbq restaurants page.

TuringNYC 6y ago

I had this happen with Hotels.com where they presented an 800 number for a hotel -- the person answering the call presented himself as the Hotel's registration desk. The entire time they are telling me this and that corporate discount code isnt available. Until I asked some key question and realized they were a 3rd party trying to book you at top-rates. I NEVER use Hotels.com for this reason, it is meant to extract as much as possible and take away the pricing power from the hotel.

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ubermonkey 6y ago

Yelp's been doing that bullshit for years.

foxly 6y ago

Why not create your own Google ad for your restaurant and point it directly to your website. With doordash likely doing this for millions of restaurants, it can’t possibly cost more than a few cents per customer to outbid them.

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cactus2093 6y ago

> But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! This is one of the most depressing parts about working in tech for me. Basically no company is content with making a good product (for some definition of what that even means, that phrase itself is obviously subjective). Ideally a site/app is solving a real problem for their users, and they could make a simple, clear, and consistent interface that exposes that solution and trust the user to make the best use of it to address their need. Unfortunately that never seems to be enough. Even for companies that I genuinely believe have good motives (trying to provide real value rather than trick people into buying snake oil), they also need to sell it. They track conversion metrics and then they need to optimize their flows, which inevitably makes things more complex and more obfuscated. Basically every PM or product-focused founder I've worked with is thinking about how to push the user to where they want them, rather than how to make things clear so the user can choose what they want to do. It's the behavioral economics idea of nudging run completely off the rails. The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly. And your competitors are doing this stuff too, so they'll eat your lunch if you're not good at growth, marketing, and optimizing conversions. It's similar to how I've never encountered a product person who takes the spirit of things like GDPR seriously. It's do or die and if you try to do things like respect users' privacy on principle instead of do everything you can to optimize conversions, you'll lose. I've come to accept that there doesn't seem to be any way around it, this is the cost we pay for the tech products we use (and, contrary to perhaps a lot of others on HN, I do really believe that a lot of these services are genuinely useful in my life, and it's still worth it to me to use them despite this sad reality).

techsupporter 6y ago
> The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly. Someone will inevitably come along and claim this is how capitalism works, survival of the fittest, ruthlessly efficient markets, and all of that. Which, of course, is entirely reasonable if that "assume a perfect sphere on a frictionless plane alongside a perfectly rational actor" model of economics actually existed in the real world. It doesn't. At the risk of sounding like I am moralizing, which I am but not in a negative or peacocking way, this is why I work to optimize my choices deliberately against financial gain and towards things like my community, my environment, and my society. I buy from companies that, best I can tell, pay their workers reasonably and act responsibly. I have walked away from projects at my employer--and, once, threatened to leave my employer (along with several of my coworkers) if my group insisted on proceeding down a path that it, happily, abandoned. I deliberately don't own a car, order from delivery services, or shop at Wal-Mart. Why? Because while individual actions make a very little impact, setting the example for those actions gives others both the courage and the cover to take them alongside me. I can't sit idly by and wait for "the group" to do something, even to my own financial detriment[0]. Make no mistake, I work in tech like a lot of us on HN--though I am not a software developer so perhaps not as well off as many but still doing fantastically well compared to the most--so I am coming at this from a position of privilege and have a very long way to fall before I hit bottom. Most of us do, which is why it is incumbent upon us to make decisions not solely in pursuit of money and to translate that into our businesses and, frankly, if the shareholders don't like it then they can say so while I'm converting my corporate format to a SPC. 0 - "Detriment" here meaning that I'm spending slightly more than I "should" if I optimized output solely for cost and making slightly less than I "should" if I optimized input solely for gains.

jsonne 6y ago

I run quite a lot of Google search ads. To the tune of multiples of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. There's a small distinction I want to make here. It is not only allowed, but common, to bid on the name of a competitor. What you can not do is use their name in their ads. If I had to guess what's going on here is that at the scale DoorDash is at they're almost certainly utilizing dynamic keyword insertion where it grabs your search query and inserts it into your ad text. This is probably just an oversight honestly. I highly doubt there's some advertisers menacingly rubbing their hands together and cackling as they type in "saddleback bbq" into the ad copy. This is probably just an oversight on Google's part tbh. Edit: I believe that you can stop this to some degree also by registering your trademarks with Google. Here's their ads policy. https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en

Avicebron 6y ago
I agree, this seems to be an automated form of clickbait. It's not necessarily malicious, but an increase in the arms race for clicks and purchases. It's been like this on Youtube for years.
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otterley 6y ago
Quoting their policy: "Ads may use the trademark in ad text if they meet the following requirements: "Resellers: The ad's landing page is primarily dedicated to selling (or clearly facilitating the sale of) products or services, components, replacement parts, or compatible products or services corresponding to the trademark. The landing page must clearly provide a way to purchase the products or services or display commercial information about them, such as rates or prices." If I were a delivery service, I would argue that my business operates as a reseller of the restaurant's offerings and that my use of the trademark is permitted per this clause of the policy.

helen___keller 6y ago

> The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash. I'm not sure I buy it. I work for one of the delivery companies, and small locally owned merchants give better margins and more profit compared to these giant chains who can negotiate really low commissions. On top of that, you risk losing the customer because you have to keep them interested. They were literally looking to order food and you brought them back to the 'browsing around' stage. Is that actually a good idea? I'm not so sure.

pmoriarty 6y ago

For those arguing in favor of this madness, think of how you'd feel if you typed in google.com in to your web browser or clicked on a Google link or selected a Google bookmark and instead of taking you to the google.com website the browser took you to a list of websites with Duck Duck Go at the top. You could switch the sites two around, or substitute any other web sites and have the same problem. Or how about if you try to vote Democrat and instead of registering your vote you are shown a list of non-Democratic candidates with Republicans at the top? Or vice versa.. If you're in favor of the one, you should be in favor of the other. To argue in favor of this is to argue for less consumer choice and power.