Lawyer Marketing GuyLets Understand the Marketing…!

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.