I dunno. Steven is here in the forum, perhaps he can shed some light on it, but perhaps he'll want to keep the secret to himself.

oh..no, its not steven's ads. Its some other marketer who uses known names as keywords for his ads.

Using special characters like that is indeed against the terms. This advertiser will have his ads disapproved when a human reviewer gets to it. The only special characters that I know for sure are allowed are the TM (trademark) character and the copyright circled C character.

As for affecting CTR, this would attract the eye more to that ad, no question, so more people would actually read the ad. But the text also has to be compelling for dramatic CTR increases. I don't think these ads will do this, at least I wouldn't click on them and I can come up with something better. The ad still needs to be inviting to the reader for them to click on and no amount of trickery can do that.

Interesting. I doubt too that those chars increases the CTR rate. Even though I've noticed ads that were using bullets in the ad text on the first description line and on the second description line. So the ad would have appeared like the title with 2 bullets where there were to main benefits of the product. I have a feeling that is a good use of special chars and it did improve the CTR rate. But again, I think that's against Google Terms too.