Once you decide on on the direction of your brand, never forget it and never deviate from it. I noticed two recent examples of brand deviation or destruction by major corporations.

Recently, Domino’s announced that (after 40 years) they discovered their pizza wasn’t good! Can you imagine that? So they reinvented their pizza and recent advertising has focused on nothing but how proud they are of their new taste.

New Year’s Eve was Tavern on the Green’s last night for dinner under its current ownership. Now, after a fight for ownership rights of the brand, a Manhattan federal judge will decide who gets to keep the name Tavern on the Green, valued at $19 million. That makes the brand worth 50% of annual gross receipts of $38 million. ^{1 2}

While a name like Tavern on the Green has tremendous value as a brand that draws people to the restaurant, lawyers are in a different situation with two distinct differences.

Retailers and some lawyers have long known that credit cards create more sales and larger sales. Now, the Salvation Army has reported that their experiment with accepting sidewalk kettle donations by credit card from wireless credit card processing transmitters has been a success.

The Associated Press reported today, “Major George Hood, spokesman for the Arlington, Va.-based charity, said that the donation sizes are similar to online donations, which average about $75. CNN reported that the Salvation Army claimed that sidewalk donations increased from $1-2 paid by cash to $14 paid by credit card.

Would you like to instantly and simultaneously give your contact information to a group of people? Let’s say that you’re giving a legal seminar about asbestos litigation to a group of lawyers. Now, you can simultaneously give your contact information to every attorney listening to your seminar.

All you have to do is tell someone or a group of people to text your username on their cell phone to 50500 and your contact information will be sent to them. It’s that simple and it’s even free!

Brand fraud online is increasing and law firms are not immune.

CMO COUNCIL reported that “A global audit of 306 marketers, sponsored by MarkMonitor, a leading provider of solutions for enterprise brand protection, found that trademark trespassing is moving increasingly online, and fraud is becoming more difficult to identify due to the increased sophistication of brand hijackers.”

For quite a while, e-mails have circulated which purport to come from a law firm or in some illegal way use the name of a law firm to perpetuate a fraudulent scheme. A search on Google came up with a myriad of complaints about schemes involving the name of a law firm.

Winning an election is all about advertising and it’s all in the message. McCain is using the tried and true Republican message which is attack the opponent. This message has worked very well in the past, but is not working now. Attacking the opponent works when the population is happy. When things are not going well, this type of strategy does not work.

When people are unhappy, a political candidate must explain what can be done to make things better. When people are already happy, changing things can only present risk. Thus, attacking your opponent becomes an effective strategy.

If video on TV is so much better for capturing attention than online advertising, it would stand to reason that video is the best method for advertising online. With online video advertising in its infancy, the findings by a leading market research firm The Kelsey Group, while startling, is not surprising.

Smallbiztechnology.com just published an interview on September 9, 2008 by Assistant Editor Laura Leites with Keith Wiley, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications at Spot Runner. Wiley stated that “The Kelsey Group, recently released a study indicating that the local online video market will see an increase in growth from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012, a compound annual growth rate of 167.8 percent. At Spot Runner, we’re seeing particularly strong growth among restaurants, jewelers, law firms and professional services companies.”

I’ve wanted to write another article about the Yellow Pages, but want to get a quick note out about a FREE webinar tomorrow, Thursday, September 11 at 1:00 PM Eastern Time.

The webinar is moderated by Dick Larkin, the Yellow Pages Commando who is a nationally known expert who formerly worked in the Yellow Pages industry and for the last couple of years has been a proponent of online “yellow page” advertising.

I believe he has found that the print version is not yet dead and he promises to provide some very interesting and useful information. The webinar will also include several experts from the Yellow Pages industry.

Years ago, people told me that the Internet would be the end of TV advertising. I told them that my fear was that demand for TV advertising time from online companies would substantially increase and push TV advertising costs higher. Today, there are a great many online businesses which spend much of their advertising budget, if not the bulk of it on TV advertising to bring traffic to their websites.

TV viewers are quite familiar with some of the largest online advertisers, Vonage.com, Monster.com, Ameritrade, Netflix, Scotttrade, LendingTree.com and Ditech.com. In fact, your knowledge of these brands probably emanates from TV advertising.

Lawyers have a lot of common sense. It’s probably the single most important trait of a lawyer, but when it comes to issues outside the scope of a client matter, some lawyers get lazy and put away their common sense.

I was at a seminar on May 20, 2008 about attorney advertising on the Web, where FindLaw was the featured speaker/presenter. FindLaw was presenting some useful information about websites and website advertising, but they also were promoting FindLaw websites for attorneys.

On March 3, 2008, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s anti-spam team made several predictions for 2008, one of which was, “A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.”

Because of the low cost of .info top-level domain names, they have been used by spammy web masters. What are spammy websites? That’s a topic for another article, but basically they are worthless websites, designed only to make money for the webmaster and which Google has no interest in presenting to their users. You can read about some of the characteristics of spammy websites here.

Do you know how many potential clients you are losing because their e-mails are returned undelivered? I believe lawyers don’t really need new clients because eliminating spam e-mail seems to be more important.

I do TV advertising for personal injury lawyers and marketing for criminal lawyers. I often send e-mails to lawyers who request information or with attached files, such as an agreement. My e-mails are frequently returned as suspected spam or virus content.

Many lawyers tell me that they would like to try TV advertising or billboards for a month. If it’s working at the end of the month, they will continue. When these lawyers consider if their advertising is going well, they look at the number of calls they received and want to see that enough clients were retained. Many of these lawyers will be disappointed and go away happy that they cut their losses, never realizing that they really cut their profits.

Many legal practice consultants advise attorneys to cross sell legal services to their existing clients. For example, I, as a personal injury lawyer, could let my clients know that my law firm also represents clients for immigration, divorce and bankruptcy. It sounds like a good way to generate new business. Even if you don’t practice in those fields, you can refer these clients to other lawyers and get paid without doing any work. But it’s actually counterproductive.

Lawyers are often as afraid of advertising as playing Roulette. Try it for a month and if there’s no winnings, cut your losses! The casinos aren’t worried. To them it’s all business. They know they will lose big every now and then, but overall, they know, and control, the exact percentage of profit on each game.

Just how much of a return on investment should you earn from advertising? Do you expect to spend $12,000 a month on advertising and earn $50,000 every month? After watching the CBS News “Sunday Morning” show about drug advertising, I decided to take a look at what their happy with.