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.

Recently, in an effort to attract more potential clients to their website, Lawyers.com began advertising on TV and joined the list of other website companies to advertise on TV. I’ve been saying for a long time that online directories can work well for lawyers, but they are usually overpriced and cannot produce a large enough stream of clients for the price.

TV advertising is substantially more powerful than the Internet and is the answer to increase the value of an online directory. As the other online brands, Lawyers.com will see a valuable return on their investment in 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.

A FindLaw employee stated that “4 million people per month are coming to FindLaw to look for an attorney”. That’s quite an impressive figure. That’s not 4 million people per month coming to FindLaw. That’s 4 million people who are coming to FindLaw specifically to look for a lawyer! Surely, if even a very tiny fraction of that traffic should come to my website, it would be worthwhile. A lot of the lawyers at the seminar seemed very impressed and not one lawyer questioned this amazing statement.

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.

GoDaddy is now offering.info names for only $.99. Such a low cost allows a webmaster to cheaply set up thousands of spammy websites. Google has been trying to get rid of spammy websites for a long time through a myriad of methods. Google results have substantially improved over the last few years specifically because they have been successful in eliminating many spammy websites from the search results.

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.

Although I advise lawyers that their spam filters are creating a problem, none of the lawyers have ever turned off their spam filter. Maybe they don’t know how. Apparently, they do not even know how to accept my e-mail address as an accepted address. They usually just give me an alternate e-mail address.

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.

Outside of the legal profession, retailers, long experienced in advertising, plan their advertising campaigns differently and evaluate ROI differently. For instance, stores routinely sell “loss leaders” just to get customers into the store with the hope that they will purchase other items, come back again, and refer their friends. Retail stores look beyond the initial customer that was brought in by advertising.

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.

First, it’s much easier to get clients to call you when they know that you only practice in one field. They will think of you as a “specialist”. It’s the same as a brand. Brands for one product are always stronger. The more diverse a brand becomes, the weaker it can get.

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.

Sunday Morning says that “the United States makes up just a measly 5 percent of the world’s population, but it accounts for a whopping 42 percent of the world’s spending on prescription drugs “. Even advertising executive Jerry Della Femina takes pills every day for problems he just worries about. Jerry Della Femina said on Sunday Morning, “You don’t know how sick you’d be if you didn’t take it”.

The first rule of both marketing and advertising is to make it as easy as possible for your customers, or clients, to contact you, yet some law offices are actually turning away new clients.

Last week a large personal injury law firm, interested in advertising on TV, found my other website and sent me an e-mail requesting that I call with more information about 1-800-HURT-911. I called them from my private phone line, instead of my office phone line. Because my private line has caller ID blocked, I heard “Your call has been properly delivered but the party you are trying to reach is not accepting calls from callers who do not allow delivery of their telephone number.”

No matter how many times I encounter this, and its happened several times, I am still astonished that a business could intentionally present an obstacle to potential new clients and existing clients when trying to call.

Today, a friend who is a collection lawyer in New Jersey, told me a story about a woman who he represented for free. The woman was previously represented by a New York lawyer in the Bronx who stole her entire $25,000 settlement. The client, on her own, obtained a default judgment against the lawyer but was unable to collect any money. My friend successfully obtained reimbursment for her from the New York State attorney-client fund.

My friend said that he found out that the lawyer in the Bronx had been disbarred because he stole money from many other clients, but was never prosecuted. He said it’s like Lays potato chips, once you have one, you can’t have just one. He said that New Jersey prosecutes lawyers when they steal money from clients, but that New York does not.

Strict new lawyer advertising ethics rules are being proposed in New York, I suppose to improve the image of lawyers in the eyes of the public. The rules will become effective November 1, 2006. Will new lawyer advertising ethics rules have any effect on shaping the look of lawyer advertising or improving the image of lawyers? It depends upon the creativity of the lawyer or the advertising agency.

It’s really not that difficult to convey a thought without stating it. It just needs a little creativity. Consider the Verizon Wireless TV commercial for their new Chocolate cellphone by LG. If you watch TV, you must have seen it. Their TV commercial exudes sex more than any TV commercial I have ever seen, yet they do it all with chocolate and music, without any mention or images of any sex in the commercial.

An e-mail was just sent out to advertisers participating in Yahoo! Search Marketing, formally known as Overture, advising of the proposed class action settlement for bidders advertising during the period of January 1, 1998 in July 31, 2006.

Affected bidders should submit the Assertion of Right to Participate in Additional Claims Review Process form by November 20, 2006, indicating that you intend to file a claim form for Yahoo! advertising credits and give up your ability to sue Yahoo! over the subject matter of this case. The Assertion of Right to Participate form is available for download at
www.checkmatesettlement.com.

The Plaintiff Checkmate Strategic Group, Inc. claims that Yahoo! has breached its contracts with Class Persons and committed unfair business practices including improperly collecting revenue by charging and/or overcharging Class Persons for clicks that were fraudulent, click spam, invalid clicks, etc.

When there is little competition, business is easy and brute force advertising, using lots of money, works. But, when the going gets tough, brute force is destined for failure.

When the competition intensifies, differentiation decides success or failure. A few large companies may survive by increasing brute force, but most will fail. Companies that differentiate themselves and their service or their products will not only survive, but will succeed.

When the first IBM PC came on the market, there was little competition and IBM had the funds for brute force advertising. When the competition got tough years later, brute force advertising stopped working and instead of differentiating their product, IBM simply pulled out of the PC market.

It may seem like a good idea. You can save the 15% advertising agency commission and you can save a lot more than that if you end up with an unscrupulous advertising agency that substantially marks up the media time and then charges a commission on top of that.

The truth is that buying your own TV media time is a huge mistake, unless your law firm is large enough for an in-house professional media buyer. Buying your own TV media time is equivalent to your client being his or her own lawyer. Not only does it require experience, knowledge and services you don’t have, but it is much more work than you think, requiring time you don’t have.

Yesterday, Imus was interviewing George Carlin on MSNBC. Joking about some future catastrophe, George Carlin said he expected to wake up some morning and see it on CNN. He could’ve said that he would expect to see it on MSNBC, especially since he was appearing on MSNBC, but he said he would expect to see it on CNN because CNN is the dominant brand in his mind.

Today, I received a joke by e-mail which referred to a journalist investigating a news report, however the joke didn’t just state that a journalist was investigating this report. It stated that the journalist was from CNN. What was the point of stating that the journalist was a CNN journalist? There wasn’t any, except for the possibility of the joke writer intending to elevate the status of the journalist, indicating a more serious matter that was being investigated. Whatever the reason was, or even if there was no reason, CNN was only mentioned because it is the dominant brand in the joke writer’s mind.

It has been reported that Cellino & Barnes, a law firm in western New York, has approximately 150 billboards advertising their law firm. Of course, the law firm name of Cellino & Barnes is prominently displayed on the billboards. Recently, one of its principal attorneys Ross M. Cellino was suspended for six months from the practice of law.

The Appellate Division, 4th Department said that an attorney who is suspended cannot hold himself out as a lawyer. Consequently, the law firm changed its name to The Barnes Firm and and will now have to change every one of its billboards. At a cost of approximately $1,000 in printing and installation costs to change a large billboard, this will cost the law firm just a few dollars to change approximately 150 billboards.