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I was able to remove the ads that included our trademark fairly quickly by contacting Google.
For the rest, you just have to start your own campaign against them. Since our own company's keywords are pretty low search competition they are extremely cheap to bid on. When competitors see that you are bidding against them, they might back off (they did in my case).
This is common practice. Google's policy is different depending on country and it changes pretty frequently. There are two issues here: Appearing on searches containing your company name and using your company name in ads. The latter has a better chance of being removed upon complaint, especially if the landing pages don't have anything to do with your company. In some countries (not the US, UK), Google usually acts…
If they are intransigent, explain that you understand but, just so they know, you will be pursuing a Tit for Tat strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat Communication really helps when you're tit-for-tatting, so contacting them will help on that front. If you are all relatively small, there are no antitrust issues at all.
If you are nervous about contacting them, you can pursue a tit for tat strategy anyway. To make it clear what you're doing, use the exact same copy that they do. If you want to be really direct, write a message to them in the ad copy.
In any case, you said they're bigger than you, so you'll actually get more leads from doing this than they get from keywords on your brand.
Your best bet might be to register your trademark with doubleclick, then lodge a complaint against your competitor using your product/company name in their advertisements. Try here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
We don't own the trademark (I mean, we never registered it officially). Since we are small, we are putting our money on things that we thought mattered more. I guess we will have to register it. thanks for the tips.