AVALANCHE: The Lawyer Marketing Group

A Special Note to Current Advertisers:

What advertisers cannot measure may be more important than what they can measure. Frequently television advertisers track (measure) the number of new clients their television advertising generates. Tracking can give advertisers reliable data on both the number of new clients generated and on the total revenue generated through advertising.

Unfortunately, though the data are often accurate and reliable, the data are often misleading: advertisers cannot track end-users who, after being interrupted with unwelcome commercials for months or years, are driven to select competitive providers. That is, advertisers can measure what they capture (numbers of new clients or revenue generated), but they cannot measure the number of clients their advertising diverted to competitors. It is not unusual for an advertiser to air commercials that capture X new clients while driving 2X new clients to competitors’ doors. This advertiser measures X and incorrectly concludes “my advertising campaign is successful.”

Other factors to consider before buying television advertising:

Are other law firms advertising on television?

Have law firm advertisers dropped or significantly reduced their television advertising in the past five years?

Can your firm afford a sustained advertising effort?

Can you coordinate your television advertising to coincide with an overhaul of your yellow pages’ advertising?

What coverage will your dollars buy? Are you paying to advertise to viewers who cannot conveniently do business with you? Can you mitigate that?

Can you fee share?

What will your state’s Rules of Professional Conduct allow?

Which programming will produce the greatest ROI? Jerry Springer or the Evening News?

Meaningful Difference in Attitudes about Advertising

Were advertising to be eliminated from print media, circulation would drop precipitously. Print media viewers want their advertising. Yet, numerous studies demonstrate that most viewers would pay more, sometimes substantially more, to have commercial-free television and radio programming. This consumer dislike of advertising in broadcast media poses a real problem for television advertisers.

When advertisers interrupt viewers often enough with their advertising content, the viewers (the advertiser’s prospective customers) get irritated at the advertisers.* People who are irritated at advertisers tend to not become those advertisers' customers. Can advertising effectively generate new customers when it irritates its potential customers? Certainly not in a cost-efficient manner.

*A 2002 survey conducted by Leo J. Shapiro Associates for the Section of Litigation for the American Bar Association revealed that 45 percent of the survey respondents thought lawyers should change the way they advertise. (27 percent thought lawyers should stop advertising altogether).

Can law firm advertisers run television commercials that don't interrupt, and consequently irritate, their potential clients? Is it possible law firms could advertise with commercials that give viewers the content they want and still deliver a compelling and memorable message? What would advertisers have to do?

1. Advertisers would have to give viewers the type of content the viewers want: entertainment.
2. Advertisers would have to keep their commercials fresh, fun, and exciting so viewers would want to watch their commercials. (Advertisers who use a series of different, themed commercials tend to have more success with fewer insertions than advertisers who "saturate" with the same commercial.)
3. Advertisers would have to generate positive associations. (Many commercials generate negative associations. Aggressive, mean representation, a theme common in law firm advertising, is easily interpreted by the consumer as “aggressive, mean lawyers.”)
4. Advertisers would have to give viewers a compelling reason to select their firms in preference to other firms.
5. Advertisers would have to create powerful marketing messages, simple and memorable, so viewers would remember their firms’ names when viewers need legal services. (People do not turn on their televisions when they need legal representation; they ask for referrals or, more often than not, open yellow pages' directories. Successful television campaigns are backed up by yellow pages' ads reflecting content contained in the television commercials.)
6. Advertisers would want to place their commercials so the commercials are seen regularly enough to be remembered, and not so frequently that the commercials become a nuisance. (Entertaining commercials can be aired more frequently because they have less of a nuisance-factor. Entertaining commercials also have a track record of generating greater recall—they don't have to be aired as often as information-based commercials to generate similar response rates.)
7. Advertisers would want to accomplish these things without alienating doctors, judges, juries, and fellow lawyers.
8. Advertisers would have to do all of this without violating their states’ Rules of Professional Conduct.

Mighty big order! Ready to step up to the plate?

Quick Guide to Law Firm Advertising on TV

Selected Excerpts from the Forthcoming Publication The Complete Guide to Marketing for Midsize to Large Firms.

Can television advertising be profitable for my firm?
Do you sometimes wonder: Is television advertising really profitable for law firms? Or, do lawyers buy television advertising to stroke their egos, with profitability being a secondary concern?

Other questions about law firm advertising present themselves: How does the potential return-on-investment for television advertising compare with the potential return for other types of advertising? If television advertising can be profitable for law firms, how can you, as an advertiser, make sure you build and place the best possible advertising content in front of the viewers who are most likely to respond favorably to your message? How can you determine how much advertising to buy, where it should be placed, and how often it should appear?

Profitable Television Advertising

In order to make television advertising a profitable marketing vehicle for your law firm, you need a working understanding of three closely related things:

1. Media
2. Advertising
3. Things that Motivate People to Respond Favorably to Law Firm Advertising

Once you have a working understanding of these media marketing fundamentals, you can select content for your television advertising that influences viewers positively. You will also be able to make profitable return-on-investment media placement decisions.

Because these key elements – media, advertising, and things that motivate people – function in concert, a useful understanding of any of these three elements cannot be gained without understanding the other two. It will serve us well to examine the three key elements in concert.

A Few Notes About Style:

People read newspapers and magazines; people watch television; people listen to radio. Whether reading, watching, or listening, people are assimilating content while they are doing their reading, watching, and listening. These terms, “reading,” “watching,” and “listening,” become burdensome if every time the process of assimilating content is expressed as “people reading newspapers and magazines, people watching television, or people listening to the radio.” In this paper, people assimilating content from any media shall be referred to as “viewers."

“Media” is a plural word, gaining acceptance in popular usage as a singular word. To most ears, “media are” sounds awkward. It is, however, correct.

A Note About Content:
Movies, books, even live theater, are media. However, for the purposes of this paper, information about media that traditionally do not deliver advertising content, such as books and movies, will be excluded.

How About My Website Address?

At our last staff meeting, it was recommended that we include our Website address on the closing screen of our television commercials directly under our telephone number. We spent a lot of money to build the site and it seems everybody says we should put our Website address on everything we use for marketing. What’s your take? - Patti Mazzi

Given all that I have learned about advertising and marketing, specifically about advertising on television during the past twenty years, I would encourage you to not put your URL (that’s the acronym for Universal Resource Locator, or “Website address”) on your commercials. Why should I make such a recommendation in the face of so many voices crying out to put your URL everywhere?

The number of national television advertisers who placed their URLs in their television ads peaked three years ago. (Local advertisers may have peaked last year; we won’t know until the end of this year.) Why has the practice of placing URLs in television commercials fallen out of fashion? Because it was not working. Placing URLs in television commercials was a fad, a fad without utility.

Seems that for a few years nearly everybody was following the common “wisdom” of the day by putting their URLs in their commercials. But when somebody (many “somebodies” at many companies really) started evaluating the results, major advertisers started dropping their URLs from their television commercials (even while visits to their Websites were increasing). Why the URL frenzy in the first place?

Two reasons I can think of, both theories.

First, everybody in the industry of building or selling Websites, and everybody involved in Internet technology and E-commerce wanted to see the world turn to the Internet. They wanted to realize the promise of the Internet commerce boom as quickly as possible. And everybody in the industry recognized that availability of search engines alone could not get everybody to use the Internet. Without a huge increase in Internet users, the E-commerce boom simply could not produce the results promised, so industry professionals, those who had their jobs and their incomes riding on Internet usage, encouraged (demanded!) advertisers to put their URLs everywhere in the hopes that the ubiquitous URLs would drive more people to the Internet.

Second theory. Lots and lots of people watch the Super Bowl. And not all of them are there to watch the game. Tens of thousands of advertising professionals (and hundreds of thousands of others) turn on their television sets to watch the commercials. Advertising professionals “look into the future” of television advertising in the same way the fashion industry looks into the future of fashion by watching the major New York and Paris fashion shows. The year before the dot.com bubble burst and dot.com companies had oodles of money to spend, about three of every four commercials that appeared during the Super Bowl were paid for by dot.com companies. They all had their URLs displayed prominently on the screen. Makes sense when you are a dot.com and much of your revenue is derived from Website visits. Doesn’t make much sense though if you are a food processor and consumers buy your food at the grocery store. Doesn't make much sense if your law firm wants people to call the office to discuss a case either.

Then again, oft times, advertising doesn’t make sense; it follows trends. At least until somebody runs some hard numbers.

So, Patti, in spite of this information, your firm’s partners may take the position that it can’t do any harm to have the URL listed in your commercials. They may take the position that all the potential is upside potential.

They would be mistaken. Big time. Listing a URL in your television commercials could reduce your calls by 20 to 30 percent. Call me if you want to know how.