Complaint about 'ambush marketing'

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FMA is assessing a complaint about Milford Asset Management’s marketing activities.

Tuesday, March 10th 2015, 6:00AM 2 Comments

by Susan Edmunds

Fisher Funds boss Carmel Fisher says she is disgusted at Milford’s tactic of “ambush marketing” – using the Fisher brand name in a Google AdWords marketing campaign.

Milford is believed to have paid to have had the Fisher Funds brand name as one of its Google AdWords keywords, used to attract customers to its website.

When someone typed Fisher KiwiSaver into Google, they would get an ad for Milford.

Fisher said she had been told it had been happening for some time and was not happy about the brand being misused.

The FMA confirmed it had received a complaint.

Spokesman Andrew Park said: “The FMA has received a complaint about certain marketing activity by Milford, which is being assessed. There is no connection between this complaint and the current ongoing investigation into Milford.”

Milford managing director Anthony Quirk told Good Returns that the “ambush marketing” was not meant to have happened.

He said Milford had contacted other KiwiSaver fund managers to explain.

"It has never been our intention to use such tactics in our marketing. The instances reported occurred without our knowledge. In fact, we were shocked to learn of them because we had taken normal precautions to protect the brand of other companies from this sort of incident involving Google search. When we learned what had happened we instructed our web marketing agency to stop Google keyword searches while we investigated and resolved the issue. We have also contacted the other companies involved to tell them what we knew of the incident and assure them that it was not the result of any deliberate action on our part."

Quirk said the company was taking action to prevent similar breaches occurring in future.

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