Sunday 20 February 2011

An Upset on an FA Cup day.

A tweet yesterday informed us that massive drinks company had launched a formal objection about the branding of the Lovibonds 69 IPA.
Apparently Diageo think that Joe public might get it confused with one of their scotch whiskys called VAT 69.
The awesome beer.
The Offending Whisky

Clearly I, as Joe public am confused by these labels, after all one says whisky and another says it's IPA. 
The tweet in question was a welcome one. Apparently Diageo filed formal opposition a day too late so it was therefore INVALID!
Ha! You'd have thought their legal teams would have known a bit better than that! Maybe their legal team are fans of the beer! 
As the manager of the bar that the 69 IPA launch was at last year, I know I'm not the only person who thinks it's a superb beer with superb branding and that the branding is nothing like the VAT 69.
Round of applause anyone? I think so. Congrats to Jeff, Jason and everyone at Lovibonds, long may the 69 IPA continue.


7 comments:

Jason Stevenson said...

Cheers Glyn, We are not out of the woods yet they have 14 days to lodge an appeal but it is looking positive thanks for yours and everyone's support it's great to know people appreciate what we do.

Cheers, Jason.

rabidbarfly said...

Will keep an eye out for the news on this one. In the mean time, I urge more eloquent bloggers to put fingers to laptops and shout about this one. Pete? Mark? Chunk? Melissa? Dave? Monkey? all of you, come on!

Sid Boggle said...

These faceless corporate bastards! Instead of 'dress down Friday', they must go through the web trying to work out who they can harass. I wonder if they ever went after Sham 69?

rabidbarfly said...

do a piece sid, after the city game of course. ;-)

Cooking Lager said...

Currently it sounds nonsense but when you look at the Apple brand it wasn't an issue as Apple computers agreed to stay out of music when the Apple music publishers took exception to their brand. Roll forward a few decades and Apple computers are in the music business. If you own a brand you protect it, who is to say how either company wish to extend the brand in the future, with both being in the booze market?

Oblivious said...

Diageo has just bought (today) Turkish spirits maker Mey Icki for 1.5 billon. So it may explain in part their current stance at attacking anything that might appear to infringe on their brands

Jason Stevenson said...

Cooking Larger, we were happy to sign our rights away for other drinks in the 32 class, however they wanted us to sign all rights away in whole classes that had nothing to do with beer for example not using the 69 IPA branding on clothing or in advertising rights that they did not have but wanted to impose on us. If we did this they would allow us to register the beer class 32 IPO without objection. I don't think that is like the apple thing as we would never had rights in class 32 to anything other than beer but trying to enforce restrictions upon us for things they have no control over, on the pretence that they will then allow our trade mark without objection is just bullying! You either object to a trade mark because it is close or not, you can't say yes you can use it but not in classes we don't even control or even have any registered rights in preventing it being used for anything else including any advertising is just not on!!.

Jason.