What’s That Shiny New Marketing Toy You’ve Got There? || Google’s Out Of Home Ads

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis: We’d love to hear from you so we can make our show better.

Conrad Saam: Please share five minutes with us at legaltalknetwork.com/survey.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Be sure to tell them you love LHLM most of all.

Conrad Saam: We’ll choose five respondents who’ll get selected among three great prizes: air pods, Beats and the solo stove firepot. That would be awesome. From our survey sponsor Nota by M&T Bank.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors: Clio, Lawyaw, Posh Virtual Receptionist and Nota. Conrad, I made some ribs this last weekend and I understand maybe you also made ribs.

Conrad Saam: I made ribs. I think you have to end out the summer season with ribs. Right? Or some barbecue just to pretend the kids are back in school but you’re just elongating the summer just a little bit better. You know the other cool thing I did is my favorite, not that this is a parenting show, but I also bought which is shockingly inexpensive a blow-up projector screen to do movies outside. So as the days have gotten shorter, we’re now showing movies outside for the neighborhood kids and so we have a bunch of kids coming over every Saturday night to watch movies with ribs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Are you charging admission?

Conrad Saam: As far as you know, the admission is just a love and adoration of their parents for me taking kids off your hand on a Saturday night.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Very nice.

Conrad Saam: No. But it’s a really fun way to — so I wanted something COVID safe that we could do outside with a bunch of friends back to school and so, it’s been a good little community gathering that we’ve been able to create.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What movie did you play?

Conrad Saam: We are going to play Napoleon Dynamite next weekend which might — none of my kids know about so I’m excited about that. But we watch Spider-Man into the spider-verse which bluntly I was never a comics guy and I’m guessing I didn’t get 90% of the movie. I was also cooking ribs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Not a raving review from Conrad.

Conrad Saam: No, no. Everyone loved it except I. Everyone loved it but I was busy cooking ribs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So what else we’re going to talk about today besides Spiderman and ribs?

Conrad Saam: Oh boy. This is actually going to be pretty jam-packed. We typically try and jump through the news quickly. There’s a lot of news coming out of the holiday weekend so there’s a lot to catch up and then we’re going to dig a little bit deeper into some of those news items. And the next thing for our first segment, I’m really excited to talk about this. This is the dangers of chasing the shiny new toys for your marketing, right? And the importance of actually experimenting with a shiny new toys. And then speaking of shiny new things, we’re going to end up talking about Google’s poorly named out-of-home advertising product that they just talked about this week. Before that, we’re going to listen to some tunes.

[Music]

Male: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Welcome everyone to another episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend as we’re recording just after Labor Day. It’s great to be back here with you. Conrad, let’s dive in to this giant pile of news.

Conrad Saam: I wasn’t trying to end that sentence, giant pile of news. So the big thing that we were talking about last time that I still think is interesting is the Google helpful content algorithm. My experience with our clients, I suspect you are seeing the same, is a bit of a yawner in terms of any changes. Is that accurate for you?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yes. It’s a big to-do about nothing, you know. I don’t want to turn this into a negative rant but this is what the no SEO industry does. This is what the SEO industry does. By the way, Google’s doing this too. They know exactly what they’re doing as well.

So, Google has this fancy algorithm, all this stuff going on to try to sort through the mess that the web is. And Google, you know, the actual search engineers, they make updates to the algorithm to make the results better you know. What better is, we’ll let the search engineers decide or now the AI decide. But I digress Google announces, “Hey, we made an update. If you have unhelpful content on your site, this classifier might make it not rank as well.”

And of course, the SEO industry, because this is how they make their money. It goes out and says, “Oh, new update from Google. You better hire us to fix it. Your contents, everything’s broken, everything’s bad. Your site’s going to disappear from search results. You better hire us.” And then with some exceptions, with some notable exceptions. And guess what? The stuff that when it does happen, it happens on ginormous websites, not small law firm websites, not the local pack, it might be like your old blog post or your keyword stuff, this or the million plurals like that’s unhelpful. Maybe some of that gets filtered.

(00:05:10)

But to your point Conrad, we haven’t seen a ton. Most major people who spend their days staring at search console and Google Analytics haven’t seen a ton. They did some — I think Barry Schwartz at Roundtable did a survey and said about 20% of people saw something happen and it’s still rolling out so you know, it’s still too early to even talking about this. But what is the helpful content update Conrad?

Conrad Saam: Well so, very quickly it is a site-wide adjustment based on how much, what Google considers helpful content. They’re calling it helpful content to make it sound innocuous and they’re not calling it a penalty specifically to make it sound innocuous. The interesting thing for me is that they talked about this so much, they named it ahead of time and I’m going to give a counterpoint to the nothing happening, a counterpoint perspective on this because I actually — all of the signals suggest that this will be a big deal.

The last time when Panda rolled out, it hits something like 22% of the web if you have a massive site. And because it’s site-wide, this is important. If you have a very large volume of pages on your website and a lot of them are garbage, it will actually have a negative impact on your good content, right? And that’s what it means by site-wide algo update.

There is a great post. Joy Hawkins brought this to my attention this morning. It’s a great post by Marie Haynes and what she writes about is her expectation that this, even though nothing really big is going on right now, she says the last time there was a major rollout, the changes happened at the end of the rollout. So the variability in search results didn’t happen until the very end of the rollout and her hypothesis is that it’s going to happen again. I think that is highly possible but we’ll see, right? Like she could be wrong. This is just a kind of her theoretical perspective. I tend to agree with her because Google has made such a big deal of it which is out of the ordinary for how they typically operate.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So let’s say you and Dr. Haynes are right, then what would you do? What do you do? What do you tell a small law firm website clients to do to their websites to prepare to have a great helpful content update?

Conrad Saam: Don’t do anything. Henny Penny. The sky is not falling and we don’t know if it’s falling until you’ve got at least two weeks of data posts update. So you need to sit tight and strap in and watch the data, right? So none of this meant like Gyi and Conrad prognosticating and disagreeing over this. Who cares? None of it matters. What really matters is how your traffic changes, how you are converting traffic changes if your traffic changes and so you need to sit and wait until you’ve got enough data to actually make that assessments.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And by the way, even with that data, there are hundreds of other updates going out of Google that they don’t even talk about and so try to distinguish between helpful content update and the hundreds of other algorithm updates that might be causing the same problem.

Conrad Saam: And finally, we will move on from global content. The smaller your website traffic is, the less scientific — this is just basic statistics but the smaller your website traffic is, the less scientific any study is going to be because you simply lack the sample size to ascertain whether or not your site is getting hit or if it’s just natural variability in behavior.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Statistical significance, such a pain.

Conrad Saam: You know, my –.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Data scarcity.

Conrad Saam: I try not to talk about my kids too much but my oldest kid is taking AP stats in high school and that makes me very happy. It’s one of I think the best classes you could take in high school to prepare you for real life. Okay, moving on.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Best tip.

Conrad Saam: My case, document automation and accounting. What’s going on with my case Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, the race to be the platform operating system universe, whatever metaverse, who want to go there, whatever you want to call it, for legal is on and my case is definitely in that fight. And so, they’ve integrated their document automation and accounting similar to what Clio is doing and some of these other major platforms but you know they want to be one stop shop, right? Like run your firm so it’s your whole firm. Payments accounting intake, whole consumer journey right there in that app.

Conrad Saam: And not a surprise, right? Like people look at the complexity of all these different systems it’s difficult.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Who wants to open two different systems?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, zero, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Not me.

Conrad Saam: Speaking of the my cases of the world, Clio conference is coming up in October. We’ve got the Crisp Summit November 2 and 3. I also noted like there’s some crazy people showing up at conferences. Obama is going to HubSpot inbound. He’s the keynote at HubSpot. I will confess, I did actually apply to speak at HubSpots in town conference, probably 90% for the slight opportunity to actually meet Barack. That would be super cool.

(00:10:05)

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, they got to bring Obama and because no one wants to go to conferences anymore and so –.

Conrad Saam: Well that’s an interesting thing. We’re seeing a really interesting shift in the conferences. It’s those in-person conferences, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Conrad Saam: Also Gyi, you are the kiss of death for Amazon medicine. It was canceled before our episode. We talked about it last session, Amazon medicine. We talked about whether or not that is a hint that Amazon might be prognosticating or thinking about or toying with the legal industry. Before the episode went live, they had canceled it. So there’s an article in the Washington post about Amazon. A kiss of death Gyi for Amazon medicine.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, you know, Bezos is a big LHLM guy and so, when he’s sitting there, he’s just can’t help himself. But interestingly, the Washington Post article that I will cite is actually talking about how they are still very keen on doing health. Anyway, take a look, decide for yourself. I still think and we know this. I mean you worked at the company that I was thinking like this many years ago.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But a site where you go for lawyers, right? And Amazon’s the site where you go for everything so, look, they’re not there yet, there’s a lot to do. But even if it’s not Amazon, someone’s going to be that.

Conrad Saam: Someone’s there. It’s already happening, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Conrad Saam: The different models. And that’s why we bring it up because I think it’s really important to think well outside our typical construct of what practicing law means in order to think about what the future looks like. Speaking of what the future looks like, you’ll be able to delete your racist tweets in Twitter now by editing them. Twitter’s opened up an editing feature so you can erase your stupidity from the past. Good or bad Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Do you have the other functionality on your app? Do you even have Twitter? Are you on Twitter?

Conrad Saam: I used to be such a heavy Twitter operator. Twitter. And I have found honestly that the — you will find me nowhere on TikTok yet although — and we’re going to talk about the importance of this. The lurking on these things is really, really important, right? Because there are so much to learn just by lurking. You don’t have to engage but lurking and we’re going to get into the shiny object thing but lurking on these different platforms is important. Yeah, I do not have the Twitter edit functionality on my Twitter account.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I don’t either and I don’t know if maybe –.

Conrad Saam: I think they may be rolling it out to people who say stupid things all the time.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, they don’t care. I can’t get a blue check so they don’t care about me.

Conrad Saam: All right. You said TikTok.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I did.

Conrad Saam: TikTok is really changing the way Google is thinking about how the next generation is finding information. There is a great TechCrunch article on this. We’ll put this in the show notes but Gyi, can you talk about how the success of TikTok and Instagram is shaping and Google’s response to the successive TikTok and Instagram but shaping the way younger generation is actually looking for information?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. The short version is that people are actually going to TikTok and Amazon to find like places to eat. I think that’s like the big example. But the point is, is that the users are now using social platforms more in the context of search, right and discovery.

And you know it’s funny. I don’t know if you and I talked about it. I remember this conversation long ago and Facebook was originally pushing like their search functionality. It never really was a thing because no one went there to do that. But now, these users are. So they’re going and they want to see, they’d much rather see like somebody, one of their influencers or a friend or somebody talking about with a video about the place, the food, all that kind of stuff, the ambience. And so, Google’s like while we’re losing searchers to social platforms, we need to start thinking about how we can learn from TikTok and Instagram to make search results more visual and image-driven, video-driven. I think that’s the gist.

Conrad Saam: And I’m going to come back to this lurking concept. You will not get this unless you start lurking and playing in some of these different platforms because you will see. It’s so real when you’re there and it’s — reading it on TechCrunch is nice but actually experiencing it is really important. They’re going to talk about the new thing and how to approach that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You know I got to — this is a show about bashing the legal profession. Usually, we say about lawyers, they’re so slow to adopt this stuff. Something’s changed. I don’t know. Something — lawyers need to dance or something but there are lawyers all over TikTok and all over Instagram like it’s going out of style. And I’ll tell you, it’s not just agency idiots like us that are pushing them there because a lot –.

Conrad Saam: It’s not agencies like us. The agencies will get it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah. They’re taking this on themselves. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the performance aspect of it but someone has convinced the legal profession to be on (00:14:53) and Instagram.

(00:15:05)

Conrad Saam: And they’re all over. This is to me, this is a pure supply and demand thing. Dean Blachford of Ottawa, he’s a tax lawyer out of Ottawa. I did a great session with him the other day and he said — he was talking about the amount of time that he puts into his charity event and how that is kind of leveraging online to make that really, really successful. And he literally said, “I don’t spend money on Google ads. I do this instead and it’s so much more effective.” And what’s happened is, pure supply and demand, Google ads so expensive, everyone’s playing in that game. You’ve got to find blue ocean strategies for that. SEO, god help you if you are starting out, right?

And so people are looking for different resources that are going to drive business and you and I both started as SEOs but there’s so much out there that is not SEO and Google ads. And so, people are finding that. It’s just economics. All right, let’s take a break. We’re going to pay some bills and when we come back, we’ve got the Legal Trends Report minute as well as talking more and more about the new, new thing. This is thematically coming across quite well in the session.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s almost like we planned it.

Conrad Saam: It’s almost like it’s in the show notes.

[Music]

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Gyi Tsakalakis: And now for the Legal Trends Report minute brought to you by Clio.

So many legal professionals see practice management software is a key area for investment. And in fact, according to the Legal Trends Report, it accounted for a moderate or large expense and 67% of survey respondents, more than any other category. You all can’t see this because you’re just listening to me and I’m not hearing the scream. But in the Legal Trends Report, there is a chart that talks about expenses among lawyers who are very involved in finances.

And the reason that I wanted to really zero on this is that if you look at the number one category, practice management software, it’s viewed as a large expense. It doesn’t mean it actually is, it’s just the perception of. And then you come down and you see marketing website and domain which is an odd way of saying it but it is what it is. And that’s a much lower perceived expense and I don’t know what to make of it. I was kind of thinking about this and in preparation, it just strikes me. I think about practice management software and you know may be excused for different sized firms but like that’s the significant expense? That’s the major expenses practice management software, not marketing? In fairness staff was up there. Associate lawyers were up there.

Conrad Saam: No but I mean, not in fairness. I’m looking at the graph that you’re talking through right now just so I can describe it for everyone. Practice management software is considered a large or moderate expense by more people, the non-lawyer staff and associate lawyer staff, right? So you’re spending, and this is again perception.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You think? You think. Yeah. You think you’re setting more on practice management.

Conrad Saam: So you’re pretty annoyed about your practice management. So I would much rather spend money. I would rather see, this is inverted, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. I mean, staff and staff, I get that one but I don’t know. I don’t know. A part of me thinks that maybe it just skews for this particular service runs. But draw your own conclusions. Go download the Clio Trends Report to learn more about these opportunities and much more for free. Download Clio’s Legal Trends Report at clio.com/trends. That’s Clio spelled C-L-I-O.

Conrad Saam: Now Gyi, we started this session off talking about the new new thing and chasing the new, new thing and you and I are both technology people.

(00:20:00)

There’s always a new, new thing coming out, right? So we we’re talking about TikTok and Instagram and the effectiveness of that which seems surprising. There’s lots of other new, new things that kind of crash and burn, right? And so, I know how I handle this for the agency, it’s probably very similar to how you handle it for your agency. But how do you think lawyers should be thinking about the new, new thing and how do you balance staying abreast of changes with technology with not going bananas on things that are never really going to take off?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well that’s part of our job, right? It’s our job as the agency experts to stay on top of this. I think that’s part of the value we bring to the table that’s self-fulfilling. When we started planning for this segment, it was funny because it was really bash chasing shiny objects. Like that’s really how we started. But as we started talking, I think you made the point of how important it is as to balance the shiny object syndrome with keeping informed about what is new.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Anyway, I think that it’s a much more of I think balanced construct than just like, it’s so easy to be like oh, you’re silly for chasing shiny objects?

Conrad Saam:  I think the problem that we get to is that some of the shiny objects actually hang around, right, not most of them, right?  Not most of them.  Those of you who are really big on meerkat a long time ago, those of you who were just all over Clubhouse and the mindset — 

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Oh, no.  Now I know you’ve made somebody angry that’s listening.  You’re about to bash Clubhouse.  Oh, boy.

Conrad Saam:  Well, by the way, and I genuinely mean this because I would love to have the conversation if you have found Clubhouse, if you still find Clubhouse effective for you from a business perspective, we would love to talk to you.  In preparation for this pod today, Gyi and I looked up lawyers on Clubhouse and I sat in on a Lawyer Clubhouse session last night.  That was all of the reasons why shiny objects that why we were making fun of shiny objects like A, I couldn’t believe it that seven people were actually spending half an hour a week with the same group of inane conversations.  B, maybe it’s just a really bad data point that I had here, but if Clubhouse is still working for you, we would love to know about it and where I’m going with this is I played with Clubhouse heavily when it came out.  My gut was it was going nowhere because of the way it was set up and I think I was right.  I’m happy to be wrong.  I’m happy to have someone walk in and tell me how it is driving their immigration law firm practice and I just don’t understand that would be amazing.  We’d love to have that conversation.

But my point is not that like hey I called Clubhouse for being that flash in the pan, it was I’m happy to be wrong about that and you have to play in the game to understand whether or not this works, right?  And you have to play in the TikTok game to understand whether or not it works.  You have to play in the Instagram game to understand whether or not it worked.  It doesn’t mean you have to pick the right tech and I think that’s often the case.  Oh, you know you’re a great tech person because you saw Clubhouse coming and you thought it was amazing and you got everyone on involved.  It’s knowing what’s going to work or what’s not going to work.  I think that’s the deal.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, I guess my thing about all this stuff is what works for some people doesn’t work for everybody and what doesn’t work for a lot of people does work for a few because I think about this and I’m sure there are people that are using Clubhouse to have conversations and build connections and maybe there’s look — bottom line is this, forget about the example, you are in, if seven of my closest business advisors, referral sources, professional contacts.  We are getting together on Clubhouse once a week and we were referred business to each other and talking shop.  I would find that tremendously valuable now.  Does it have to be our own Clubhouse?  I think that’s part of the question too is, it’s like — it’s not about the technology, right?  It’s about like where the people are that you want to connect with.  I’ll tell you, I’m on Facebook for that very reason.  I don’t want to be on Facebook, and I, we all have our personal preferences of like the different social media that we like, but a lot of people I know both personally and professionally are there.  They’re not on Twitter which I guess I tend to prefer despite all these problems.  I don’t know, so.

Conrad Saam:  But you’re not on MySpace, right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’m not on MySpace.  I know I never.  We got it.  I’ll remember this.  I’ll always remember this even after I’m done with all of this.  We got all of these questions about how do I put Pokemon go to work at my law firm and I was like, are you serious?  You want to stop doing all of the other marketing activities and just have everybody all hands-on deck to get the firm on Pokemon Go.

(00:25:04)

Conrad Saam:  That was like a crate.  I actually use that as an example of in my linked building talk.  I asked who tried to get into the Pokémon Go game and they’ll have people in the audience, stand up.  And then I’ll ask them to stay standing if they did it for the links.  If they did it for the links, they’re winning.  If they did for the Pokemon Go accident player in Nebraska, you don’t get it.  Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  All right, hype builds links, no question.  I mean right now, it’s web 3.0 and metaverse links — 

Conrad Saam:  Metaverse.  Should we be in the Metaverse key? Should we drop — 

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You are.  I am not.  I actually am telling you I’ve never been in Metaverse.  You are the authority on Metaverse at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  Wow, because you went to a conference in Metaverse didn’t you?

Conrad Saam:  I did.  I did.  It would turn into a very awkward conference in the Metaverse where you had your own avatar and I remember literally like it’s almost a satire of itself.  I had to virtually find the Virtual Helpdesk to find where my virtual room was so I could virtually give a talk.  It was bananas.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I don’t think I’m entering the Metaverse until it’s like the movie Surrogates, which by the way, was a terrible film.  But until it’s like seamless where I can’t tell the difference, like it’s like Matrix level, that’s when I’ll go in.

Conrad Saam:  Well, I had much better hair in Metaverse.  Let’s leave it at that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’m going to ask of you, you up your avatar game.

Conrad Saam:  I was taller, you know.  It’s a little buffer, much better hair.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Maybe.  I’ll try this thing out.

Conrad Saam:  You don’t need better hair, dude.  This is why I like to have podcast with you because next to you my hair looks, you look kind of marble Greek god hair thing going on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I guess, thanks.  Maybe.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah.  No, no, no.  You should be doing more of this on video.  I should stick to podcast.  So, from each of us a prediction for the next new, new thing.  Gyi, what do you think the next new, new thing is?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Sadly, I think it’s — well, not sadly.  I think it’s going back to basics.  I think the new, new thing is like really focusing on local, like not local SEO but like getting back out in your community.  We just came off COVID.  I think there was some erosion of that as a focus.  Everybody’s on Zoom but it goes back to the point about the shininess like yeah, there’s always going to be a new app.  There’s always going to be a new way to communicate, to connect, to share, to engage but the new, new thing for local lawyers that serve the local community it’s going to be getting back to that.  And now that is that going to happen just in real life.  No.  It’s going to happen on all these new shiny platforms but if you ask me like what’s new, new?  It’s like I think about that Seth Godin post on Clusters. We’ll post that again too but that’s what’s changing.  There’s literally so much bombardment of media that we’re going to go back to filtering a lot of it out, getting connected to law.  I think about this even in a lot of the groups I’m on like I don’t — not on the wild Facebook like I’m in a private group or I’m in a group of people that share affinity interests as I do.  I think the more — it’s like masterminding online that kind of stuff.  Now, is that new?  I don’t know if it’s new.

Conrad Saam:  More helpful content because of Google?  I don’t know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  The new, new thing is helpful content if you heard it first on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam:  There’s always going to be a new thing.  I don’t know what’s new right now.  Metaverse is new.  That’s what’s new.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I think my take on the new thing is an adjustment of the business model of legal and that is going to happen.  It may happen faster in some states than others, but I think it’s very valuable.  We spend a lot of time.  I spend a lot of time with lawyers talking to lawyers and I think it would be very helpful for the legal community to – I got a request for a coach, a business coach the other day.  This is from someone who went to grad school, but at Michigan.  She is a wealth management person.  She works with some white shoe attorneys and she asked me for a business coach for them.  And the interesting thing for me here was I told her that she should really get someone who’s very experienced in legal.  And I’m going to reverse that conversation when I’m talking about the new, new thing.  I think it’s very important for the legal industry is to stop talking to lawyers all the time.  Look outside the way things are delivered.  Look differently, I mean, look at the way Amazon deliver services.  Look at the way that other industries are doing an amazing job of creating a different experience like there’s so much out there and the way we deliver the legal service is going to be fundamentally different.  And if you have to stay in legal go, look at Hello Divorce and looked at how they’ve looked outside the legal industry to think about how we deliver Family Law Services in a fundamentally different manner.  Go there, right and then think about how that applies to your immigration practice or criminal defense practice.

(00:30:03)

All right? It’s time to have another ad break.  When we come back, we have got a review coming us to Apple podcast and we’re going to talk about the new, new, new, new thing Google Out-of-Home ads.  Coming to you, direct out of Mountain View.

[Music]

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[Music]

Christopher Anderson:  The Un-Billable Hour podcast is devoted to all aspects of managing your law practice outside of your client responsibilities.  I am Christopher T. Anderson, a lawyer and the host of the podcast with each episode I invite industry professionals to discuss best practices for marketing, time management, client acquisition and everything in between.  For actionable and practical information to refine your practice, turn to The Un-Billable Hour on The Legal Talk Network.

Gyi Tsakalakis  As you may know, if you’re a regular listener to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, we are so grateful to the people who listen to us and those that leave reviews, valuable tips, five stars, Gyi and Conrad know their stuff.  They don’t hold back.  Listening to this podcast will help you grow your practice.  I think that’s Josh Baron.  Baron Josh is the user but it’s Josh Baron.  Thank you, Josh of The Apple podcast.  If you do like us, hate us or indifferent to leave us your view.  We’d love to hear from you.  Subscribe on YouTube.  If you haven’t checked out the YouTube channel, check that out.  There is some cool outtakes and whatnot.  Other Salinas and then if you got feedback, if you had topics you would like us to cover, if you got questions, hit us up, #lhlm on all of the various social medias.  You can also feel free to message us.  We are very friendly, but we do appreciate it.

Conrad Saam:  We are always friendly.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  We are always friendly.  Well, I am sometime.

Conrad Saam:  No, we’ve got you riled up recently.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  All right, speaking of shiny objects as we were, Google is coming off the screen and coming into the real world with Out-of-Home ads delivered through Google display so Conrad, that sounds pretty fancy.  Can you explain what the heck this is.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah.  So it is, unfortunately, I can’t believe they called it this and I think it’s Google who’s named this.  It’s called Digital Out-Of-Home inventory.  The acronym is DOOH so I don’t know if someone was being really clever at Google or really clueless but it’s called DOOH.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  It’s DOOH.  DOOH.

Conrad Saam:  It’s the (00:33:18) version inversion of digital marketing.  So the Out-of-Home digital marketing is basically the ability to buy digital billboards through the Google interface.  It is fundamentally a consolidation of existing networks.  So you were able to do this before.  We have done this on occasion for our clients not to Google but directly through some of the Networks.  So it’s a consolidation of, I believe eight existing networks and it’s fascinating to me for the legal industry because this is very much built around branding, right?  And so the metrics that they talk about, when they talk about the success of these programs are very much around brand awareness and brand consideration.  These are not things that Gyi and I typically talk about, but if you are a large offline brand advertiser, this may be something to consider.  The cool thing because it’s digital is twofold.  It’s very easy to in real-time adjust, right so, you can turn things on.  You can turn them off, and there’s two levels of targeting that I think become helpful for the right law firm.  The first is geolocation.  So, you can be very, very specific about where your ads appear, and what area.  So you could think about at the tackiest of levels, putting your advertising around digital advertising billboards, around hospitals if you’re a person under a lawyer, right?  And so that is something that is the targeting becomes very interesting on that.  The second targeting that I think is for the right again, you have to think about how this applies to your specific practice area.  For the right practice area is interesting, is what’s known as day parting.  Day parting is a process of saying I want this to show up during these specific days of the week or the specific times of day.

(00:35:06)

So you could, for example, if you are I’m going to just do this off the cuff.  If you’re a criminal defense attorney, you could make sure your ads show up over the weekends or during like if you do DUI, for example, heavily showing up during St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve, instead of buying a physical display ad that you pay for over the entire month, right?  And so it’s interesting to me, Gyi, the one caveat on all of this is the overall objective which is brand awareness and brand consideration, branding and legal, super, super hard outside of PI.  We see very, very limited amount of branding exercises and so to me, the first question that comes about here is, are you engaged in building brand?  And if that’s not part of what you’re doing, this is probably something that you should just frankly supple, I need a pod and go, listen to something else right now?  Or am I wrong, Gyi.  What do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Lot, lot coming back there.  I think this — I talk about something new in China and even though it’s not totally new, I think it’s a glimpse.  I mean we’ve all seen the movies, right?  Everything is covered in digital billboards everywhere you look.  Right now, we stare down at our phones but as their it with advancements in AR and VR and metaverse and all this stuff.  This is what it’s going to look like folks.  You’re going to have digital Billboards in your Uber.  You’re going to have digital billboards in your own self driving car.

Conrad Saam:  You see it’s brought to you by digital billboard.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, I’m being a little bit facetious here but this is where people want to take this just to be able to say look, you can manage across all of these different places.  They’re already doing this.  They’re making it easier to do it in real life and I think that you’re going to see a growth of this and this is all — it seems silly but metaverse is going to have ads in it folks and those ads, it’s going to be the same type of thing.  And so it’s kind of just point of a branding.  Yes, this is not a direct response play here, but one thing you said, did it kind of surprise me?  I’d see a lot of branding going on in legal.  No, then PI.  I mean, how many different animals —  

Conrad Saam:  No, no, PI is 100%.  PI is 100%, 100% but you see guys.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  But I see them more on some of the other categories but I would say it’s not prominent.  I think you’re right that most estate planning lawyers.  There’s no brand position.  Now, estate planning lawyer, right.  I think that’s true and I would encourage if you’re one that kind of lawyer like you don’t have a brand, I would encourage you to revisit it.  I don’t know that you’re going to come up with a brand position.  I don’t know that there’s some kind of like catchy motto slogan for what you do or that’s just not your style, but I would at least tell you to do the exercise, do the branding exercise.  Think, because it will laser focus even beyond just your brand positioning or laser focus where you’ve dedicated resources.

Conrad Saam:  And so I want to a couple things.  One, there’s a fundamental split between brand awareness and brand positioning.  So brand awareness is like unaided.  I know who this is.  Positioning is like we are the easiest one is with family and divorce like I’m the men’s divorce firm, right?  So you’re talking about like the market that you serve, or why you do it or who you are and what makes that different.  I’m the local guy, whatever it might be and I think that’s second thing is super, super important like and, Gyi and I have talked about this ad nauseam.  Your positioning is not a gavel and leather-bound books, right and columns, right?  Oh, it’s not even you have a JD, right?  Every lawyer has a JD.  Merry Christmas good for you.  It doesn’t matter.  So I think that’s a really good thing.

The other new ones to this with Google that I think is important to understand before and I didn’t cover this one, I was giving the description about it.  I think it’s important is these ads are not personalized, right?  So they are not like oh, I know Gyi was on my website or I know Gyi was shopping for an X, Y or Z at Ford and so now I’m going to show my Chevy.  They’re not personalized but they are contextually relevant based on location and time of day which is where that geo-targeting and departing comes in.  But, it will be interesting to see how lawyers spill their TV.  I mean, this is a grab from Google to take your offline display TV, billboards, radio et cetera and push those funds into Google by offering a very, very comprehensive reach as well as the ability to have a very, very programmatically relevant and you could tune those ads based on time of day or things that are going on.  So, think about Camp Lejeune, right?  So that has become a big thing.  Everyone’s kind of spending money on this all of a sudden that’s going to die down in two months or it may already die then but it gives you that flexibility to adjust with the times and I think that will be fascinating to see how that works.

(00:40:06)

Gyi Tsakalakis:  And, you made me think about this.  You will be able to target on a bunch of other things beyond just time of day and location because they know a lot more.  So, when you go and if you ever try to go by like outdoor media, they’ll say things like this make cars go past the billboard and I think that’s, that’s your impressions, right?  But Google is going to be able to do a lot more to talk about like, here’s what we know about the people that are approximately located to this particular sign.  So it’s not exactly custom audience like that but you’re going to get some very interesting affinity data to be able to play spits.  And then the other thing that you said as I know, we’re running out of time here but it’s so important on the awareness versus positioning.  If you’re not doing positioning, don’t waste your time with awareness, right?

Conrad Saam:  You know what?  That actually might be that we should we should put that at the beginning or maybe we do a whole session on this but that’s really, really a great piece of advice because otherwise, you’re basically marketing your category, which is legal, which is pretty big and includes every single person that you compete with, because you’re just another JD, right?  And you’re not marketing yourself.  You’re marking your category.  Great advice, Gyi.  Hold the best stuff for last.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, and with that, speaking of last, it’s over.  Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  If you just landed here, please do subscribe.  And we’d love to hear from you, #LHLM, across the socials.  Please reach out.  Drop us a review and until next time.  Gyi and Conrad, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  We’re out of here.

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Male:  Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  If you would like more information about what you heard today.  Please visit legaltalknetwork.com.  Subscribe via Apple podcasts and RSS, follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  The stupid Google update is not really loud so I think it’s more about me yelling than it was.

Conrad Saam:  How much do you like the highest fee, Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Oh, God.

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