TV advertising – It’s not traditional, but it works. Jon Robins looks at the rising trend of law firms on the box


The camera focuses on a fierce-looking businesswoman as she cross-examines our hero. ‘Well, Injury Lawyers 4U,’ she says, ‘let’s say I’ve had an accident. How much money would I receive?’ A smooth-looking lawyer, sitting in what appears to be halfway between the dock of a courtroom and an ultra-modern office, is unruffled. ‘That would depend entirely upon the circumstances,’ he replies evenly.



‘Would I be expected to pay an amount upfront, in a signed credit agreement, for example?’ the inquisitor barks, as she approaches the seated lawyer. Experts peer from behind computers and other strange-looking monitoring devices to see whether he flinches. ‘Nothing,’ the lawyer replies calmly.



‘Mr Anderson, remember where you are,’ the woman retorts, moving even closer to the lawyer. ‘Would I receive 100% of the compensation?’ Again, he looks unruffled. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ he insists, with a smug smile. He has passed the lie detector test as a voice-over intones: ‘Injury Lawyers 4U (IL4U) makes sure that you get nothing but honest, professional advice on your personal injury claim. Call 0845 345 4444 for a “no loan, no credit, no catch” service.’



It takes a rare talent indeed for lawyers to win any kind of accolade when it comes to television advertising, as firms have not much taken to the medium since the Law Society relaxed its ban on television advertising in 1991. However, this televisual masterpiece by the personal injury network (one of a series of ‘lie detector’ ads usually featuring a bossy woman interrogating her lawyer with the opening line: ‘Well, Injury Lawyers 4U…’) has made a splash and been voted the most irritating TV advert of 2006 by Marketing magazine. No mean feat given the stiff competition. It beat other major big-budget irritants such as the cleaning product Cilit Bang and Gaviscon’s traffic cop with indigestion.



‘Fantastic. You cannot buy great publicity like that,’ observes a philosophical Andrew Twambley, senior partner of Manchester claimant firm Amelans and director of IL4U. The solicitor has a point, as Bill Britt, of Marketing magazine, readily concedes ‘irritating’ means ‘engaging’, which, in turn, means that would-be clients are likely to pick up their phone. ‘What is surprising about this particular advert is that I suspect it has a relatively low media spend,’ comments Mr Britt. ‘All the other brands are very

well-known. One definition of an effective advert is that people remember it. However, it can be a problem in the long term. Can you build a brand on being irritating? That is the big problem.’



Andrew Twambley does not have much time for what the marketing industry thinks about the aesthetics of his advertisements. ‘It has been a triumph,’ he insists. ‘There is a big difference in advertising between “direct response” and building a brand where an advert might be cuddly and feelgood. Direct response means that you have to get someone to ring up within

20 minutes and that’s exactly what this does. The people who say that it is annoying are the people who don’t need the service. Hundreds of people who ring up every day don’t think it is annoying. They think it is useful, they ring us up and they’re very happy.’



IL4U spends ‘just shy’ of £7 million a year on television advertising, with each separate advertisement costing £100,000. The network is currently working on a ‘branding’ advertisement that will come out at the beginning of next month. ‘It will run alongside, or behind, the direct response advertisements to start the creation of a brand,’ Mr Twambley explains. The advertisements go out 210 times a day from 7am until 6pm, mainly on satellite channels.



The legal profession has always been resistant to taking to television screens to promote its message. ‘The first truism is that lawyers need to think about what they intend to spend and then they need to quadruple it,’ reckons legal PR guru Sue Stapely, former head of Law Society communications and author of Media Relations for Lawyers. ‘Unless you can do something that is incredibly eye-catching or irritating, as allegedly Injury Lawyers 4U have done, the need to keep repeating ads and to do them in places where they are going to be sufficiently visible is such that most firms don’t have an adequate budget.’



Ms Stapely reckons that the law-firm business model means that individual firms are not prepared to spend the money. She says that on average law firms invest 3% of their profits in advertising, compared to other commercial organisations where it is closer to 15%.



However, as Ms Stapely also points out, the legal profession remains distinctly uneasy with the very notion of television advertising. She has just returned from a debate in Italy, where the government has only just relaxed the rules on advertising for all professional firms. She reports that the Italian bar was ‘absolutely hot under the collar’ about the negative impact such advertisements would have on the ‘dignity and respectability’ of the profession. The UK profession has yet to get over its own resistance to television, she adds.



The area where lawyers have been forced to overcome their squeamishness has been personal injury. The claims farmers led by Claims Direct and The Accident Group demonstrated the commercial value of television spots. At its height, the former was churning up 5,000 new claims a week, much of that through saturation broadcast campaigns. The claims companies also took crass advertising to new depths, not least TAG, which came up with the admittedly memorable catchphrase, ‘Where there’s blame, there’s a claim’.



John Peysner, a professor at Lincoln Law School, reckons a nadir was reached by one advertisement that highlighted the luxury goods the compensation could buy and made it clear that every cloud has a silver lining.



‘The challenge for personal injury is still there,’ comments Sue Stapely. ‘The claims handling track record and the debacle of Claims Direct has degraded that practice area and its marketing in a way that I am sure Amelans and a lot of other firms are still struggling with.’



Research carried out last year for the Department for Constitutional Affairs found ‘no straightforward link’ between public mistrust of the claims process and advertising for claims companies. The evidence suggested that advertising primarily reinforced negative perceptions, rather than created them. In so far as advertisements are contributing to public views of a ‘compensation culture’, the chief issue was their sheer volume, it added.



Liverpool personal injury specialist law firm BGR Bloomer is one of a small number of individual practices that has decided to go it alone and advertise on national, satellite and local television. Its light-hearted advertisement features a dishevelled-looking superhero character wearing a yellow Lycra body suit (‘I am an accident waiting to happen’), who goes around causing mayhem by, for example, lying down in the middle of the road, knocking over ladders and blowing up electricians while a narrator explains about ‘no win, no fee’.



The firm did not want to comment about the campaign. However, Andrew Pearce, a producer at the advertising company Pacemedia, says the budget was £24,000 and air-time ‘varies but starts at £10,000 and moves quickly upwards’. He reckons the key message the firm wanted to convey lent itself to the format because of its narrow focus on compensation claims.



He says: ‘Everyone knows what a “no win, no fee” claim is, whereas for a normal [full-service law] firm, people really wouldn’t know what to expect. You would need to take the viewer through the process a bit more.’



Matt Cook, of the advertising agency Stars of Track and Field, worked with IL4U. He argues that the style of the advertisements has been a success because of their directness. ‘I imagine a lot of people will look at these campaigns and think that they have been dreamt up by some terrible creative-less hack in a darkened room,’ he says. ‘But they come out of very earnest thinking that tries to embody the important, serious, professional and conflict-led nature inherent in the industry.’



Mr Cook describes the style of the advertisements as ‘heavily done’ with a ‘harsh tone’ – ‘the delivery and execution of the actors is full-on, as is our treatment of graphics’. He explains: ‘We have found that the “lighter” the ad, the less the response, the less complaints that you get. The more people you annoy, the more people that you actually speak to and the more people you help in the long run. But we don’t set out to annoy people.’



Kerry Underwood, senior partner at Hertfordshire firm Underwoods, ran the first television slots five years ago, when he launched a £350,000 prime-time campaign hitting that most important of programmes – Coronation Street. It ran for six months in certain regions and was estimated to have shown to almost two million people. ‘It is expensive and I had mixed feelings [about that campaign] but then you see the big cheques come in a year later,’ he says.



The firm has just begun a second campaign, again on ITV in the Meridian region (around Andover, Reading, Winchester and Swindon). Mr Underwood says his latest campaign has nothing to do with personal injury but is a response to the post-Legal Services Bill world. ‘The thinking behind it is England in the 1950s,’ he says. ‘In other words, it is a simpler world where you can see somebody at the key stages in your life. The idea is, although the advert does not explicitly say it, for all these times you need a solicitor and not someone like Tesco.’ The firm has spent £45,000 on the advertisement – roughly £30,000 on the making and the rest on airtime.



The new advertisement has a series of scenarios, starting with a school boy wearing a blazer and cap, a woman in a wedding gown about to get married, and a woman about to graduate. The boy has been nicknamed ‘Johnny Slap-face’.



According to Andrew Twambley, the advertisement should have been a candidate for the Marketing awards. ‘He’s the most annoying child you ever saw,’ he says. ‘You just want to punch him.’ Kerry Underwood also agrees with the notion that ‘annoying’ ads are no bad thing. ‘If the irritation gets people thinking, that is,’ he adds.



Jon Robins is a freelance journalist