ClickZ: L.L. Bean Settles With Two in Claria Case

L.L. Bean, which sued four Claria clients for allegedly having sponsored pop-up or pop-under ads to run on its site, settled with two of them. Atkins Nutritionals and Gevalia Kaffe agreed to not sponsor such ads in the future and pay an undisclosed amount. It isn't clear if they had sponsored ads to begin with, or if instead some of their affiliates had sponsored the spots. ClickZ cites an anonymous source close to Claria as saying that Atkins wasn't buying ads from Claria and that Gevalia - not a clothing brand - was unlikely to have done so either.

Claria fired back two weeks ago with its own lawsuit, charging L.L. Bean with interfering with its client relationships and slandering its business. J.C. Penny and Nordstrom remain defendants in the L.L. Bean suit.

The Gevalia part of the suit was probably the most interesting legal conflict to many online advertising industry professionals interested in behavioral marketing. If Gevalia - a coffee company of all things - had ads pop up on an L.L. Bean site through a Claria behavioral network purchase, it may have been because the network knew that an individual was interested in coffee from previous surfing behavior. That means that the triggering mechanism may have had nothing to do with the fact that the site was L.L. Bean, and that consumer confusion was unlikely to occur between the brands. Had that element of the case gone forward to trial, it would have helped establish precedents, elements of which could have proved very useful to many other behavioral marketing networks.