Lawyers who have advertised on TV for a long time have noticed that it’s not working as well as it used to. Many lawyers have asked me why TV advertising is not what it used to be. I see some similarities with TV advertising to the Yellow Pages.

When the Yellow Pages worked well, there was only one yellow book. Years ago, there was just broadcast TV with just a very few channels. Most of the lawyer advertising was on just one or two channels. Now, there are over 1,000 channels; many different sources; and many different methods of watching TV content.

When the yellow pages calls to sell you an ad, you might want to give it some thought before saying No Thanks.

Bar 3 Bar-B-Q, a Montana restaurant, found themselves listed for free under the “Animal Carcass Removal” section in the local yellow pages after they refused to buy an advertisement in the phone book.

The listing was a featured joke on the Jay Leno TV show. Bar 3 Bar-B-Q alleged the salesman intentionally placed the free listing because of their refusal to buy an ad and Bar 3 Bar-B-Q’s parent company, Big Sky Beverage Inc., sued the yellow book publisher Dex Media Inc. The suit was settled confidentially.

Now for the second time, after allegedly abandoning their first claim, Chick-fil-A sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bo Muller-Moore who makes screen printed “Eat More Kale” T-shirts by hand.  Apparently, Chick-fil-A believes that use of the slogan “Eat More Kale” on T-shirts is confusingly similar to their slogan “Eat Mor Chikin” for their restaurants.

Although I think this is legally ridiculous, I don’t think I like to try Chick-fil-A if it tastes like a T-shirt.

In another equally interesting and legally ridiculous claim, the porn company Vivid Entertainment accused Taiwan-based phonemaker, HTC of violating their trademark by marketing their new phone called Vivid.

I received a Technolawyer e-newsletter promoting an article, by Lee Rosen, revealing the secret to charging flat legal fees. The secret is to make your fixed expenses variable. One of the expenses suggested to be changed to variable is marketing and ostensibly, advertising.

The article stated: “Now we’ve achieved variability on our marketing expenses. We have no contracts related to marketing. We can start or stop our marketing on a moment’s notice with no penalty. It’s quick and easy.”

While it can be advantageous to have variable expenses, decreasing marketing expenses when revenue is going down is a disastrous idea.  This will reduce revenue even further both now and in the future.

Bing is now using Facebook data to display websites your friends have “liked”.  This is influencing the ranking of the search engine listing results in a way that is personal to you and will display results on the first page which could previously have been several pages deeper.

If you don’t want to see results liked by your friends, you can avoid using this feature by simply not signing into Facebook.  But I suspect the people you want to reach will be using it.

The city of San Francisco doesn’t want children to get a toy with their meal at a fast food restaurant if they want french fries. However the city would allow them to get a toy if they eat something healthy (within their nutritional guidelines).

This could be just the right thing to save children from a lifetime of diabetes and heart disease, at least in theory. Or this could yet another example of regulators with a lack of marketing knowledge. It just might take the marketing people at McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast food chains at least 15 minutes here or there to come up with marketing ideas to get around the problem.

Toll-free vanity phone numbers are not only easy to remember, but after the end of a long advertising campaign a good vanity phone number can be remembered for years. After a law firm discontinued a two-year advertising campaign with 1-800-HURT-911, calls continued to come in for another two years.

That’s the problem with the New York State DMV hotline 1-800-DIAL-DMV. Due to budget cuts, the toll-free vanity phone number was dropped by the state 18 months ago and that’s when the problem started.

Personal injury lawyers beware of email scams.  Email scammers have been previously targeting divorce and collection lawyers to collect a debt but are now targeting personal injury lawyers.  Email scammers are pretending to have been in an accident and need your legal services to settle the case.  There have also been email scams aimed at the public pretending to come from real law firms (I wrote about that in my article “Is Your Law Firm’s Name or Brand Being Used to Commit Fraud?”).

I received an e-mail today from Jerrold Parker, senior partner at Parker Waichman Allonso, LLP, the well-known New York personal injury law firm.  Jerry was writing to ask me to evaluate and list his new personal injury case management software called SmartAdvocate. Apparently, Jerry invested a substantial amount of money to develop custom case management software for personal injury and mass tort cases and is now licensing it to other personal injury lawyers.

I responded to Jerry’s e-mail and he called me back a few minutes later. During our telephone conversation, we began discussing my vanity phone number 1-800-HURT-911, vanity phone numbers for lawyers and Parker Waichman Alonso’s new vanity phone number 1-888-BIG-CASE.

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, “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.” (see also at MSNBC)

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.