Should internet marketers behave with more class ?

I'm in the middle of conducting my class, so I don't expect to be blogging, but a very large financial education provider which is almost a household name today was suspected to use my partner's keywords to do their internet marketing. This created a small scramble when I started to consult some of my pals on whether my business partner has a civil case and what steps we need to take to deal with future occurrences. 

Balancing a little bit of legal research along with some feedback from my friends in the SME sector, I have to accept that the use of keywords to push up rankings to get views is a common practice, likely because most victims are rational and will not risk more capital to stem the small amount of fianncial damage that is not easy to quantify. 

Ultimately it falls to internet marketers to determine how they want the public to view them. 

I've worked with great marketers but I also worked with quite a number of scumbags. Sometimes you can't tell them apart because the brand perception comes months after the campaign ends after a lot of goodwill is lost after spamming the public.

Some of the lousier marketers just want to attract eyeballs and they don't really care what happens to the brand going forward. I've seen the way how some truths become bent just to attract a larger crowd. 

The differentiating factor between a good marketer and a bad one is class. 

Those with class will spend more time understanding the brand and will focus on end-to-end conversion rates. Those without will ring-fence their responsibilities and wash their hands clean once the ad achieves a requisite number of hits, regardless of the final sales outcome. 

To me, if this were deliberate action, this large education provider has reached a new low in hiring this kind of marketer.

I think it takes a really low-class marketer to use someone else's brand to hijack eyeballs from another. Although I think we can take the higher road for this incident, I doubt this will be an isolated event. 

I'm grateful that my business is not affected by this, because if the victim were my business, I will take legal action once I have just 51% chance of success. 

A nice public open court hearing will expose these internet marketing practices to the world at large and we can let Singaporeans decide whether they want to associate themselves with the offending brand.