It’s official. You can now buy TV advertising through the Google Adwords interface. Here’s how it works. There are auctions held everyday after 5 PM PST where spots are auctioned off. When you build a campaign you are basically setting a bid price for those spots and you will not believe the bargains that are available. It is a mere fraction of the cost associated with going the traditional route.
Here are a few examples: A :30 spot on The Biggest Loser this week is going for between $5 and $10.60. Another popular show Wife Swap has spots for $3.83 to $4.50. The Celebrity Apprentice has spots for $3 to $5.50.
I plan to test this platform in the near future and I’ll keep you posted with results. My guess is that it is unsold inventory and they’d rather get something than nothing. This could potentially pose a HUGE opportunity for personal injury attorneys that are or want to advertise on TV.
Here is a very interesting video about this opportunity.
Total ad spending fell slightly in the first half of 2007, down 0.3% to $72.6 billion from the same time last year, reports TNS Media Intelligence.
“For the first time since 2001, media advertising expenditures have declined for two consecutive quarters,” says Steven Fredericks, TNS MI CEO, in a statement. “The results reflect weakness across a range of industries and advertisers.”
The biggest loser was newspaper advertising, losing a full percentage point in share, to 17.8% of the whole. Local television ads were next, slipping 0.6%, yet 10.8% of the total. Not surprisingly, Web advertising jumped to 7.6% of the ad share from 6.4% in 2006. Magazine advertising also grew to 20% from 19.1%.
But, “given the uncertainties about near-term economic growth and consumer spending, we expect core ad spending will continue to face challenges,” the report says.
What is most interesting for our industry, however, is that direct response advertising increased 11.3% in early 2007 – more than any other of the top ten advertising categories. I think we’re seeing the evidence of that with the growing number of attorneys advertisng on television.
I think we’re all familiar with TiVo and DVR’s which are both devices that allow viewers to watch time shifted programming. The downside for advertisers is that the viewer can fast forward through the ads. This has caused a great deal of discussion on many sides. When these devices initially came on the market it was assumed that virtually anyone who time shifts in their viewing is going to fast forward through the commercials and miss the advertising. But then Nielsen, under pressure from advertisers, began measuring how many people actually watched the commercials and they found that a significant number do actually watch advertisements. Nevertheless, advertisers have suffered because of these recording devices.
Recently Time Warner has announced a new plan. They will endeavor to provide a free version of the DVR, but it will not allow viewers to skip commercials. If this catches on it could satisfy both sides, the viewer and the advertiser. At a cable industry conference in late July, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the president of Time Warner Inc. said “Our research and our in-market tests show people would rather have free everything you want, when you want.” They are hopeful that viewers will choose these new devices over models that do allow for fast forwarding through the advertising.
Syracuse, New York is at the center of a debate that recently challenged the limits placed on advertising for peronal injury attorneys. Alexander & Catalano called itself “heavy hitters” in ads and had run TV commercials depicting its lawyers as giants towering over skyscrapers, counseling space aliens about an insurance dispute and speeding to reach a client. Although some of the images were referred to in the case as “silly stuff” Gregory A. Beck, who argued the case, said that “attention-getting is what advertisements do.”
The case did a couple of things. First of all the decision said that statewide rule changes that took effect on Feb 1 violated the free speech of lawyers. It cleared the way for lawyers in New York to use pop-up ads on the Internet, but did not answer the bigger but more subtle issue of whether firms must label newlsetters and e-mail messages to clients as advertising.
According to the New York Times, “the new rules defined advertising as any public or private communication made on behalf of a lawyer or law firm about that law firm’s services, the primary purpose of which is for the retention of the lawer and the law firm.” So does that mean that e-mail messages must have a note in the subject line stating that it is “attorney advertising” a designation that could trap the messages in spam filters? A companion issue is the discussion as to whether or not it is necessary to include the disclaimer “attorney advertising” at the bottom of a firm’s web site and on any proposals seeking business.
All of this is rather unclear and will tend to vary from state to state. If any of our readers have insight into these issues, please share it with us in the comments section of this post.
I was at a conference last week and had the opportunity to meet Mike Vondran of TAG legal marketing. Mike did a great presentation and I want to share some of the numbers that he gave us. Mike stated the following:
60-70% of new case calls are from women
61% of decisions relative to a PI case are made by women
25-54 is the average demo with a high school diploma or less. Blue collar
Average family PI attorneys service are single wage earner families that make $25-$50k a year
54% get their information from TV
67% spend less than 2 hours deciding on a lawyer
Mike went on to emphasize the importance of achieving TOMA in your market. Decisions are made very quickly and the tendency is to go with the first lawyer that comes to mind or is seen during that window wherein the decision is made.
In September of 2006 I heard about Spotrunner.com and I found it quite interesting. Spotrunner is a service that provides inexpensive generic TV commercials in a number of categories. When I first looked at the service, their library of attorney ads was pretty small. It has since grown significantly.
Recently they have forged a deal with Martindale Hubbell to endeavor to attract attorneys in areas such as family law, criminal, immigration law, etc. to begin to advertise.
Below is some information from their website:
Our company
“Spot Runner is the first Internet-based ad agency that makes it easy and affordable for local businesses to advertise on TV. With Spot Runner’s revolutionary approach, local businesses now have access to television, the most powerful marketing tool available—one that, due to its traditional cost and complexity, was previously out of reach.
Spot Runner offers a complete solution for television advertising—commercial production, media planning and media buying—in a single turn-key, self-service system. The entire process, which traditionally takes months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, now takes just days at a fraction of the cost.”
On their website the cost of an ad is indicated to be $499 which is obviously attractive. However, apparently Martindale Hubbell plans to offer “packaged advertising campaigns” that include air time for $10,000 to $50,000.
Intriguing but I believe it is unlikely that Spotrunner will be able to offer the kind of quality production and media buy that Legal Marketing experts such as Network Affiliates, http://www.netaff.com/legal/index.htm and CJ Advertising, http://www.cjadvertising.com/ provide.
