There is currently no acronym for the phrase “cease and desist” in Netlingo.com’s exhaustive list of text message shorthand. Don’t be surprised, though, if Graham Young is working on it.
In February, Young became the “authorized licensee” of the phrase “text to win,” which was registered with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office by J.E. Gidney Holdings-whose principal, Jeffrey Gidney, is a Winnipeg businessman-in November.
Young, a former media planner and buyer at Toronto’s Gaggi Media, became the licensee in February through family connections, and he’s now launched the Mobile Content Company (MCC), that will collect fees from marketers that use “text to win” in their mobile campaigns.
Young is charging marketers $1,500 a month for one province and a flat fee of $3,000 for two or more provinces for use of the “text to win” phrase. Those fees are waived, however, if a marketer hires MCC to execute its campaign, and Young says his company is currently finalizing its first deals with marketers to buy MCC’s services and use the trademark.
But some of Young’s competitors in the mobile marketing space are saying “WTF?” They claim his efforts are hindering an industry still in its infancy. “Everybody’s confused about what is SMS, what is mobile, how do you do this, how do you do that,” says the president of one mobile marketing company, who asked to remain anonymous. He says his company was nearly forced to cancel a national promotion when one of its clients was contacted over its use of the “text to win” phrase. “You know how brands are-they freak,” he says.
Young, however, says he’s adding value to the mobile channel by turning “text to win” into a brand. MCC will also benefit consumers, he says, by protecting the privacy of text to win contest entrants and requiring that any marketer using the trademark offer a minimum prize value of $1,500 per month for national campaigns. He adds that Gidney Holdings has defended its trademark, sending cease and desist letters to Subway restaurants and the Edmonton Journal.
But can somebody own “text to win”? Isn’t it akin to trademarking “Call now, operators are standing by” or “limited time offer”? Apparently not. In the U.S., Verizon Wireless has federal service mark rights to “TXT2WIN.” And Glen Perinot, an intellectual property lawyer at Heydary Hamilton P.C. in Toronto, says Young actually has a pretty solid case-although there are loopholes.
“The extent of this protection is basically just to the use of that phrase, an association with those services,” says Perinot. “If I put in there ‘dial to win,’ he’s going to have very limited coverage.”
