Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi...
After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency...
Published: | January 29, 2025 |
Podcast: | Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Category: | Marketing for Law Firms , News & Current Events |
If your game plan is offline advertising, but your website sucks—you’re fumbling your growth strategy. And, later, Conrad shares his origin story!
There is often a significant imbalance between law firms’ offline and online marketing investments, but things simply won’t work as well if you don’t synergize both aspects. Gyi and Conrad talk through their recommendations for diversified online and offline expenditures that can maximize your firm’s potential for growth.
Later, how did Conrad become Conrad? The child of Australian immigrant parents, Conrad shares his life’s journey from Vegemite sandwich-toting lad to MBA grad to SEO pioneer to Mockingbird Marketing owner—and everything in between!
The News:
We are brilliant crystal ball pontificators! Cases in point:
Suggested LHLM Episodes:
Conrad’s Crystal Ball IV | Lawyer Marketing Predictions for 2025
Connect:
The Bite – Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter!
Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube
Conrad Saam:
Happy birthday. Gyi, I understand you are taking a trip to celebrate Turning 46.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, no, thank you for the happy birthday. I had my birthday recently and I’ll be going on a cruise, but nothing to do with my birthday. We’re going on a cruise because my kids love to cruise and it will be mid-winter break. And so we’ll be hitting the water slides.
Conrad Saam:
Welcome to the Tsakalakis Family going cruising on Lake Michigan in February. I can’t,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
The rates are amazing. What else are we talking about besides my birthday?
Conrad Saam:
As usual, Gyi and Conrad, we’ll be talking about the news. We have a short news segment This time we’re going to go over has internet killed the TV Radio Star based on Gyi watching of NFL football during January. And finally what you have all been waiting for and what I hope my mother never listens to my origin story, how did I end up doing this for what’s turning into my third decade music?
Announcer:
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.
Conrad Saam:
Alright, first the news. Alright, Gyi, we just launched the Conrad’s Crystal Ball predictions for 2025, and we’re going to use the new segment to score some runs on that scorecard as early as January, 2022. One of the things we talked about was more non-lawyer participation in the legal market. What’s the big news about that? That came out just a week ago?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
KPMG Law Firm and A BS has been a topic. We’ve been talking about alternative business structures in legal for a long time. Arizona is a jurisdiction. I think that’s the jurisdiction that is KPMG will be starting out in a lot of interesting issues. I think for me, look, our audience tends to be smaller law firm business owners as compared to say KPMG. And I don’t think that we’re going to see KPMG competing with plaintiff trial lawyers in 2025, but big. But this is the, here comes everybody, and when this money, when you had K-P-M-G media buy competing in your local market, you better find a way to stand out. You better find a way to position against it.
Conrad Saam:
Let me ask you a question. You said you don’t see it moving into pi and I’m going to broaden that to mean overall consumer facing law. Do you see this as a move into corporate law and not consumer facing law?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, I think the initial play for KPMG is, they’re like, look, we’ve got all these clients that we’re doing tax and other consulting work for. We should be providing legal for them. That’s where it’s going to start. K-P-M-G-I don’t think will ever go into consumer law personally, I could be wrong, but this will open the door for other shops to follow suit. Whether it’s consulting firms, private equity firms, non-lawyer entities will be following this very closely. We’re already seeing that’s already happening, right? The money’s already coming in. I think the difference is though, is right now it’s like there are these firms that are financed by private equity and I think you’re going to start seeing private equity owned law firms that are direct to consumer.
Conrad Saam:
So interestingly, I was thinking about this KPMG and I had a conversation about do they go into the obvious upsell of their existing clients? That seems like a pretty simple thing, but the people at KPMG are, and not just KPMG, but these kind of name brand MBA consultancies, they’re pretty smart and strategic. And I do think there’s a possibility that a firm like that looks at a poorly run, frequently poorly run and completely unconsolidated industry like let’s say immigration line, pulling that out of the air right now and sees that as a big opportunity to come in and run something that’s both large and well efficiently run,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Assuming that they can make enough money, right? Because that’s the other part of this is that I’d be curious if you have experience, I know some folks online have been posting that they are very familiar with the KPMG model, but their billable hours probably like a thousand bucks an hour, 500 bucks an hour, just making things up here. We’d love to hear more about it. But the other angle on this though is that at least this is how it was pitched, and this is how this a BS stuff was pitched in general, is it’s supposed to open up access to justice types of opportunities for businesses to serve that latent segment of the legal market who otherwise is not getting legal help because they either can’t afford the current marketplace of lawyers. Does KPMG do that? I don’t think so. But does it open the door? Does it start to get people thinking about it more? So yes, I think it’s hard to argue that it’s not at least some tailwind in the direction of more options in the legal marketplace.
Conrad Saam:
Legal.amazon.com. You heard it on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing first. Now coming back to our theme of talking about how brilliant we are, the other thing that we anticipated for 2025, and we’re already right on, was consolidation of law firms. What happened in consolidation of law firms just yesterday,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
You tell me, Conrad, you’ve seen to know more about this story than I do, so I’m going to toss the ball back to you.
Conrad Saam:
Sweet. James purchased Atlanta personal injury firm Jen Gore. Jen Gore incidentally was the winner narrowly edged out Seth Price from Blue Shark for the most legal marketing conferences attended in 2024. But Sweet James and Jen Gore Cuthbert are now one.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, there you go. You’re poking fun at conference attendance, but I am sure that that played into brand building and a successful exit. So there you go.
Conrad Saam:
Love Jen. I think one of the difficulties with this, and this is going to be an interesting consolidation issue for people, we’ve talked about this in the past, it’s much easier to market a person than a business. And Jen has done an amazing job of growing her business by marketing herself and being out there. She’s got solid branding, she’s very social savvy and kind of ubiquitous. You take that out of the equation, it certainly makes the acquisition a little bit more interesting.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, I don’t know anything about this deal, and I wouldn’t assume that like many transactions, that there isn’t some, Hey, Jen, you still need to continue your brand for a certain period of time.
Conrad Saam:
Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. And again, I also don’t know all that in depth about this transaction specifically, but it does beg the question at a higher level, not this one specifically as we talk about consolidation, a very, very strong brand can do a lot. We’ve talked about lower pay-per-click costs, we’ve talked about intent, higher conversion rates, all of those things. You put those two things together, now you have some brand confusion and you have some brand issues to deal with when you have a business that is standing on a brand built around an individual. I think that is just a reality.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Okay, stay tuned. I’d be curious to see what happens with these brands.
Conrad Saam:
Another thing that we pontificated about was general chaos and confusion. I liken this or related this to the political climate, but in technology we’ve already had some lunacy going on in the market. What happened with TikTok?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, TikTok was banned and now tiktoks back for at least for the short term. But the lesson for me here is, and I’m reading Ryan Holiday’s, perennial Seller, which I recommend. It’s got some application I think to how you think about creating some of the services at your law firm. But one of the things he talks about is platform, right? People ask us all the time, what platform should I be on? Should I be on TikTok? Should I be on Instagram? Should I be on meta? Wrong questions, right? You need to be the platform. So it doesn’t matter if TikTok is up or down, people are coming to find you where you are. So if you had a TikTok, I mean, you see a lot of creators have done this where they’re like, they’re heavily on TikTok. TikTok goes down, they’re going somewhere else, and they’re telling all the people to go follow them somewhere else. And so that’s the way that I think of platform. And so I think the mantra of being where your audience is is a good thing, but really what this is a reminder of is that you want people coming to consume information, videos, whatever content, whatever you want to call it that you’re producing wherever you’re producing it.
Conrad Saam:
Alright? And as we’re talking about content, Google Business Profile misconduct link, Google has added a misconduct report, misconduct link specifically around reviews directly into the Google business profile. Is this a TE key or is this a precursor of a massive upgrade in the quality of review content for law firms?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, just to be clear, so they graded this form where you can report bad conduct back in November. Maybe I missed it. So if you’ve seen it before, you can bring it up. It’s new to me. But right in the business profile is this report business conduct link that takes you to the forum to report it. And so it’s interesting because it shows that, yeah, Google’s like, yeah, we get it. This is a mess. The question will be what if anything that they decide to do about it and as other issues with Google business profiles, I’m skeptical that it’s going to be that much of a dial mover, but I’m hopeful.
Conrad Saam:
Well, hold on. So I think this is actually almost comical,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Not
Conrad Saam:
Almost. I mean, this is absolutely fucking stupid. They have a problem with user generated content and they’re going to put out the solution for the problem with user generated content to be more user generated content. That’s how they’re going to solve this. That is so dumb. I can’t believe how problematic that is.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, I’m going to tell you, Greg Sterling and the crew over at Neared had a great interview with Brad. I think it’s Weatherall, I apologize if I mispronounced his last name, but he was a product director at Google Business Profiles that if you search near media interview, you’ll find this. But he talks about how they think about solving this fake review problem. And a lot of it is based on the user feedback, but it’s the trust level of the user. So if it’s somebody who is a level 10 local guide, gets a lot more credence in these reports anyway. I still think it’s comical and laugh with you, but it’s not quite as simple as like, oh, you report it and they do something about it. They’re trying to solve these problems with big data, which means like, oh, if thousands of people report this business and some of those people have high trust authority as users in the Google system that could help them identify patterns of bad actors at a larger scale. I mean, remember Google Business, you can correct me or if someone at Google Business wants to correct me, this is just my opinion slash anecdotes, but they claim to be solving 95, 90, 90 5% of the fake review problem online. But because the scale of the problem, that 5% is still massive. And so you see law firms that are in that 5% that have thousands of fake reviews. Now I’m even skeptical that they’re really solving that much of the problem.
Conrad Saam:
There’s no way
Gyi Tsakalakis:
That’s the company line.
Conrad Saam:
If you know have solved 95% of the problem, that means you’ve identified a hundred percent of the problem to even make that claim, which they clearly haven’t. That is an absurd comment.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, they probably model, right? They’re probably modeling like we believe the problem is this big and we’re solving this much of it. But they could be wrong on both of those accounts. Anyway, too much about this. If you think your competitors are buying fake reviews, I encourage you to take some action because I promise you, if you are relying on local PAC and your competitors are leaving fake reviews, they are stealing clients from you. They’re misleading clients, they’re violating the rules of professional conduct and they are genuinely harming people who are trying to make decisions about hiring lawyers. And I think that all lawyers should take a much more proactive role in trying to take action to get these negative reviews out of there. End of randt
Conrad Saam:
And do it carefully because people will come back for you.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Alright, ’em come. Alright,
Conrad Saam:
Bring it on, baby.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Suspend my profile again.
Conrad Saam:
Yeah. Oh yeah. So we may revisit this when we’ve learned more about what happened to Gyi’s AttorneySync profile.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Let’s take a break.
So sadly, as many listeners know, my Detroit Lions were kicked out of the playoffs by the Washington Commanders. And two weeks ago as I was watching the Lions play, the Minnesota Vikings, I was noticing the personal injury law firm ads that were playing during Sunday night football. And I wrote this up on LinkedIn. A couple of the points that I wanted to talk about here, A Statista, which is a data site, suggested that a 32nd TV ad during the broadcast of an NFL Sunday night football game for the 20 23 24 season was around $882,000. Now it was brought to my attention that that was an outlandish amount of money. They’re probably, Satta is probably reporting on national TV buys. And these local law firms are probably just buying some local affiliate type of media buys. But a 32nd spot still tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, I was very grateful that David Ner, who is an attorney who buys local TV media, chimed in and said that they’re probably spending closer to, I think he said around $15,000.
Anyway, point being that that’s still in the grand scheme of things for a lot of advertisers, a lot of money for a media buy for 30 seconds. Now, my issue has nothing to do with actually the cost or anything like that. Offline media works great. It’s a great brand builder. You’re doing saturation marketing, you’re trying to be the go-to person. You want to do the branded phone number stuff works. There’s a reason why it’s so expensive and why lawyers still buy it, why they buy billboards and buy a lot of other offline media. So out of the four firms that advertised during this Sunday night football game, three of them were like exactly who you’d expect. They’re the big TV, offline brand building, media buying firms. Their ads were very recognizable because I’d seen them for a long time because they’d been spending a long time buying media all over the place to get their name out there. One of the firms I was less familiar with, now, again, this is just me, so maybe there are buying media somewhere, but certainly not to the extent that these other three were buying. And so I was curious. I went to their site and noticed that just to see what are they doing on the digital game. And I was very surprised to see that their homepage was optimized for home, which implied to me that they had not actually made much, if any, of an investment in digital.
Conrad Saam:
Hey, Gyi, can you just, I’m going to interrupt you for a moment. Please do paint the scene when you say their homepage is optimized for home. Can you tell the dear listener who’s not as SEO savvy as yourself, what you mean by that and how easy it’s to make that mistake?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes. One of the most basic things that a digital marketer will look at when they look, especially obviously an SEO will say, what are the page titles? That’s the HTML title tag of the individual webpage on a website and a homepage. When you set up a website, you use WordPress out of the box or some of these other content management systems, the default setting for the homepage might be home. So your page, the homepage title tag is optimized for the word home, not your firm name, not anything to do with your location, not anything to do with your practice area, not any kind of positioning words that you might use to attract attention through a title tag. It’s the out of the box home, which implies that whoever built the website has very little knowledge of how search engines work.
Conrad Saam:
It doesn’t imply it confirms it.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
And so it got me thinking about this issue that we run into all the time, which is that there’s a couple issues here that I thought it’d be worth talking about. The first is, is that a lot of lawyers that are buying big offline media buys aren’t investing in digital the same way. Whether that’s because they just came from the world before the internet and they’ve just been like, this is what we’ve done for advertising since time out of mind, and they just keep renewing their offline media contracts with no attention to digital or it’s because they just believe in offline and they don’t think that digital does anything. And this is a constant source of frustration for people sitting in my seat because we’ll see hundreds of thousands of dollar offline media buy. And when you go to suggest something like, Hey, do you want to spend a thousand dollars a month on digital?
They’ll be like, oh, that’s outrageous. A thousand dollars a month on digital. And so you get this dynamic where digital, especially SEO, this isn’t just in legal, many SEO agencies laugh and cry at the same time about this issue of the offline media percentage of budget being so much more than the online. And my point is this, just knowing what I know, you don’t have to reallocate much. Just take 5% of that offline media budget and put it on digital. And let me show you the difference of what it can do. And I’m not even talking about a strategic change. I’m not trying to compare brand to direct response brand building on digital in terms of some of the metrics you might use, the leading indicators of success in terms of reach, in terms of engagement, in terms of targeting, you will get more of a bang for your buck. And again, because I want to make sure that this is clear, I’m not saying this is an either or proposition. I’m just observing how interesting it is that there is this often imbalance between investments offline and investments online. Conrad, what do you think about the offline online conversation?
Conrad Saam:
Well, we’ve talked numerous times about the, and I hate to use the MBA buzzword synergy,
But it is a mathematical truth. When you are running multiple channels offline or online, they work in tandem and they all improve. And when you overload one at the expense of another and you’re getting that out of balance, they stop working as well, right? So I mean, whether you’re talking about your pay-per-click budgets, which will get higher click to rates and higher conversions because of the recognized brand, all of these elements do tend to work together. You can have direct response, you can have brand building. This is the rising tide lifts all boats. And so the funny thing is, as we were doing the pre-show for this, one of my concerns in covering this topic is most of the people who are spending a lot of money on offline and ignoring digital, most of them are probably not listening to launch our legal marketing podcast, which is about digital marketing.
But those of you who are the strong digital marketers or want to become the strong digital marketers, think about what are the other elements, what are the other channels that I can put into play to support not just the online efforts, but the entire efforts of the firm? And there are lots of different ways to get the name out there and build brand. When you concentrate on one thing, we talked about TikTok earlier, should I be in TikTok? Should I not be on TikTok? If TikTok is a small part of your ecosystem, TikTok going away because of the loonie in Washington DC doesn’t really have an overall impact. When you rely on that one single channel, it works less effectively. And B, you have a problem in a lack of portfolio theory in your marketing channels.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
The other big one that comes up all the time when we talk about, and this is kind of to your point, the other side of this coin on the should I be spending money offline is like, well, how do I track it? And that kind of stuff. But one of the things that I wanted to point out in this particular story, one of these firms, this was one of the few TV spots that I had seen them run. And so again, I don’t want to cast dispersions. Maybe they’ve got a plan, maybe I just didn’t see the creative, I don’t know. But it’s important for people to realize that this offline media, for the most part is not a direct response play. People aren’t driving down the road, get in a car accident and look up and try to find a phone number on a billboard to call. That’s not how this stuff works.
They’re not watching Sunday night football in the back of their Uber, and then the Uber gets in a crash and they’re like, oh, thank goodness that this ad spot came up at this perfect time that I got in this car accident. And so if you’re going to do this kind of thing, you really needed a long-term plan with a lot of saturation. And then the tracking thing that comes up all the time too about this. So there’s some obvious ones that we’ve talked about in the show before, but one is that you can track brand search through search console if you’re running ads, you can see if brand search impressions are growing. So you can see directionally if your brand is growing from this offline stuff. There are also other things you can do in terms of if you want to get creative and you’re running more sophisticated campaigns that aren’t just trying to drive to a single destination.
If you’ve got a certain practice area that you want to start to build brand around, you can use a dedicated URL, whether it redirects or it’s a separate entity. But if that becomes the dedicated URL for that offline campaign, you can see if people are actually typing that URL into their browser, that makes that offline media more trackable. I wouldn’t use that as the only data point there, but that’s just another way that you can think about in terms of tracking offline media and offline media. I think this is a glimpse of the future. It’s going digital. I mean, a lot of these offline media companies, they’re investing in platforms that will show digital creative that rotates, that’s got other aspects to it that allow for more sophisticated data on who’s actually seeing some of these ads. And so to me, the big thing from all of this is that, and for folks that are at home that are, you’re an offline and online buyer, go look at what your budget allocation is for your offline versus online. I’d be curious to know,
Conrad Saam:
You know what, Gyi, it’s interesting. It is 10 years since my email got flooded during the Super Bowl from people who were watching Jamy casino’s absolutely batshit crazy Super Bowl ad. Now, that was a localized advertisement, but that was one of the first times that lawyers had been advertising at this level. And now it’s something that’s happening multiple times, multiple law firms in a game. We really have come quite a long way.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Do you know how many people have watched that Jamy Casino video on
Conrad Saam:
YouTube? I’m looking at it right now. 5.9 million views,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
5.9 million. That’s definitely more people have seen it on YouTube than saw it when they ran the media.
Conrad Saam:
Well, I was super critical of this because he put it on YouTube instead of putting it on his website. Website, which we’ve driven a whole bunch of links from legal marketing, neuros like you and me, completely missed link building opportunity, but 5.9 million views because it’s so absolutely bonkers. Daryl Isaacs his 2020 Super Bowl commercial video, 14 million views. It was the hammer in space. So make a splash for better or worse. When we come back, we’re going to go further back into history and I’m going to share why I’ve spent the last almost three decades working in digital legal marketing. Alright, we would like to thank Lindsay McCullough for her review on LinkedIn. I’m always on the lookout for quick and informative podcasts that I can easily consume during my lunch break. I like that people are actually listening to us at their lunch break Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing has quickly become one of my favorites and provides super helpful tips for law firm marketing. Gyi and Conrad get to the point and aren’t afraid to give you some tough love for the greater good of your firm. Lindsay, thank you so much for review. If you would be so kind as a listener, please leave us a review on Apple podcast, comment on Utah, comment on YouTube or YouTube. Spotify hit us up on LinkedIn. We want to hear from you and we’ll always try and get back to everyone who comments. Okay,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Let’s get in the mood here. Let’s get in the right mindset here. Want to Kate after your it your cave on?
Conrad Saam:
Oh, yes.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Oh, I can feel Conrad turning into a jazz flutist. Wow. But Conrad, we’d love to explore how Conrad became Conrad and landed here during Lindsay’s lunch break on Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing. Conrad, take us back. Where does your story begin?
Conrad Saam:
Well, how far back do you want to go? Gyi, Conrad,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Where in the world did you
Conrad Saam:
Come from? Well, I came to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing from two hemispheres away back in 1979. Our little family immigrated from Sydney, Australia to Princeton, New Jersey. One might think that’s not much of a massive change, but it really was. I think the opportunity for people in the United States was just so amazing. And my dad was a very, very smart man. He came over here with a business and then rolled off and built his own entrepreneurial American dream. It’s a very classic dream. I’m fully aware that I grew up kind of in this privileged opportunity because of my dad’s hard work and kind of just basic raw intelligence. And I also recognize that as an immigrant in today’s world, there’s this big anti-immigrant sentiment. I’m super happy to share a positive immigrant story. It was also tough to be the weird kid who brought you try bringing a Vegemite sandwich to school at age five. It’s not an easy place to be.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
So I was going to ask you about Vegemite, but for our listeners who are not informed, what is Vegemite?
Conrad Saam:
Vegemite is a yeast extract that looks and somewhat tastes like if you put salt on tar on the road.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
And it’s very popular in Australia.
Conrad Saam:
It is very popular, especially thanks to the Men at Work song. The British version is Marmite, which is garbage compared to Vegemite. But yeah, I ended up at Michigan in grad school, which is where you and I presumably unintentionally met at some point in time. Go blue. Go blue, baby. We’re going to win the game next year. Brief aside, yes or no?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes, yes. We’re going to
Conrad Saam:
Win again. Okay, good. I’m with
Gyi Tsakalakis:
You. Alright. What were you studying back in Michigan?
Conrad Saam:
When I got out of college, I went and worked for this guy who was the fourth generation in his business, and I really was completely directionless. My plans at the time were to do that job for two years and then go into the Marines. That’s what I wanted to go to OCS and my now wife at the time, and I can share the story, I know she does not listen to the podcast, but my now wife at the time who was also at the time, my ex-girlfriend, was dating a guy who went to Cornell’s Johnson School of Management MBA program. And the guy who I was working for who was not the best person in the world, also went to Johnson. And so I bought the Princeton Review guide to MBA schools and I drew my line at Johnson, which I believe at the time was ranked number nine. And I looked at schools that were above that, which I know paints me in a colossally petty light, but that’s what happened.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Or colossally ambitious
Conrad Saam:
Or colossally ambitious. That’s fair. I was the youngest person in my MBA class. And I think because of that I was a unbelievably intimidated by the rest of my classmates, but I also think I got more out of it than anyone else. So love the time.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
So then you’ve got MBA in hand. Do you go directly into legal or where are you? No. Okay.
Conrad Saam:
I had this great job that was for a terrible company, but I worked for this very little company called Software Online. And what I did, I learned pay per click really, really early on. So we made this terrible software that would clean up your registry and it was probably available for free somewhere else. So the business model,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
You didn’t put that in the ad copy though.
Conrad Saam:
It was fundamentally flawed and there were, I mean, you needed to gargle bleach when you went home. But I was there and I learned that people were putting in these error codes that they would get from their operating system, which at this point in time sounds ridiculous, but they would try and research these error codes. And so I could buy clicks on these error codes very, very cheaply. No one else was doing it. And then we could sell the software that probably people didn’t need, which is really, really gross. And I hated myself for doing it, but I did get to learn kind of this concept of keywords and pay-per-click systems and bidding, et cetera, which was kind of fascinating.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
That’s still a thing, by the way, not necessarily on a direct bid, but people will host display ads on sites that have answers based on organic optimizations, on error codes. So you
Conrad Saam:
Pioneered it, I pioneered it, and blah, hot shower needed.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
So eventually you got two disgusted with yourself.
Conrad Saam:
I got hit up by a headhunter who was like, Hey, I’ve got this company called Legal Brain and would you like to interview with them? And I was like, okay, what’s Legal Brain? I did a little research and turns out that it was the founder of Zillow and Expedia had financed $3 million into Legal Brain. And my very close friend from University of Michigan was the CMO at Zillow. And so I said, Hey Mark, I’ve got this interview with this company that is invested in by Rich Barton, and can you tell me what you think I need to know? So I brought over a six pack of beer to his house, which we split while he taught me two hours of SEO, which was basically all you needed to understand SEO back in 2006. So I went into the interview the next day and I looked like a genius because nobody knew anything at the time.
So it really was this kind of six pack of beer that got me the job at AVO, for which I was bluntly underqualified for, but no one knew anything about it. Legal brain became avo, and I was there before we launched. I think I was the sixth person that was hired. And the cool thing for me, the community, because it was venture backed by Barton, we were able to get advice and work from some of the people who had made a fortune on the internet learning their early stages of SEO. So these people mostly sold either pharmaceuticals, specifically Viagra through Canadian companies into the us. And what happened back in the day, if you go that far back, the Google algorithm, and this was called the Google dance, the Google algorithm was fixed. It wasn’t constant like we know now. And so what would happen is the Google algorithm would change, they call it the Google dance, and they’re used to actually be a dance called the Google dance.
And if you have one of the Google dance T-shirts, the really, really old school SEOs think you’re really, really cool. But they would change the algorithm and then a new person would be number one for Viagra Canada, and that person would make a fortune until the Google dance happened again. So these are the people that I got to learn from really, really amazing people. And no one understood anything about legal except for Tim Stanley at Justia. I was able to take AVO and really, I mean we won within, I want to say two, two and a half years. We went from legal brain to the number one legal directory on the web, which at the time, the number one legal director on the web was the number one resource for people on the web because legal directories dominated and many firms didn’t have websites, blah, blah, blah. So that’s what I did to get into legal and to get into SEO, it was quite awesome.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
And while you claim not to have known much about SEO, you did know enough about PR to be able to generate one of the best link building campaigns in legal of all time.
Conrad Saam:
So this was, and I don’t know why this is a really twisted thing, but one of the things that we did, we were sued, I believe, three days after we launched by John Henry Brown, a Seattle based lawyer who has represented some famous people. I think he likes press more than he likes going to trial. And we were rating lawyers, so scale of one to 10, we showed your disciplinary history, which had beforehand been hidden. And so a lot of lawyers hated me and they hated avo, and a lot of them still hate avo, although it’s kind of fallen off to a bit of obscurity. But my job is I was the only marketing guy, and I got kind of baptism by fire on pr. I just used to poke the bear and I would talk to people who hated us. I would talk to people who wanted to sue us.
I made it sure that everyone knew about the John Henry Brown lawsuit, and it was so much fun to get people going. This is early days of blogging. And so I knew that if I could get Kevin O’Keefe, for example, to blog about the AVO lawsuit, all the other bloggers would learn about it and they would want to blog about it too. And if they didn’t, I would poke them to make sure that they knew if they wanted to talk to me, I was available to talk to. And it was really, really amazing Link building. And that link building strategy was one of the things that got Ava off the ground so quickly. I mean, it was the thing that got AVO off the ground so quickly.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Now, Ava wasn’t the only major logo that you worked for in digital though. You were at Urban Spoon as well, weren’t you for a period of time?
Conrad Saam:
Urban Spoon. This’ll be great. I think I’m contractually not allowed to tell this story, but I don’t
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Give a s shit. Is Urbanspoon still around?
Conrad Saam:
No, it’s not still around. It was sold Urban Spoon. So I left AVO for about six months and I was excited to get into the restaurant industry. Urban Spoon was a directory, and if you are 40 or over, you will remember the early iPhone ads when they put the accelerometer in the iPhone, they needed something that functioned when the iPhone moved. And Urban Spoon had this little slot machine action where if you shook your phone up, would pop a different random restaurant near you. And so Urban Spoon got all of this unintentional advertisement piggybacked on the Apple iPhone. And so it became a pretty well-known restaurant directory. So I went there for a little while. At the time I came on, I remember the guy who hired me resigned the day after I started. That’s fun. And that was not good. It was not a good start. That was the good times. It went bad from there. Urban Spoon really wanted to replace OpenTable as a reservation site for high-end restaurants. And OpenTable was making a ton of money. It was venture backed. In fact, it was venture backed by Bill Gurley who was also on the AVO board. So when I went to Urban Spoon to try and compete with OpenTable, I remember Bill sent me basically a Go fuck yourself email. I’ll never help you again,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Making friends everywhere you go.
Conrad Saam:
Yeah, totally, totally. Anyway, the problem of course with Urban Spoon was 98% of the traffic was SEO generated. And 98% of that traffic didn’t look at high-end restaurants that had a reservation function. So it was destined to fail, which I, in my very low EQ fashion was very clear about pointing out to the management. And I got fired. So I remember it was on a Friday, I lasted I think all of six months, but I did a quarterly review of how our attempts to move into the OpenTable market had gone. And at the bottom of each slide, I had a stamp of the word failed because we had operated poorly. And I know as an interview, this would be a bad example to be trashing your previous employer, but this was a disaster. So I got fired and I had a couple of people that I knew in the legal space from all of my work at avo. They asked me to come on board. I created a company called Atticus Marketing, which is still the legal name of Mockingbird. And I started doing consulting and then it just kind of took off from there. And I never intended to create an agency. In fact, I never wanted to work at an agency. And yet here we are. Atticus started in 2013, and so we’re 12 years in at this point in time.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
And then I had around, I don’t remember what year it was, had been hosting Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing. I couldn’t think of a better person to have come join me on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing than Conrad Saam.
Conrad Saam:
Listen, I will tell you this, your large S was still surprising to me when you offered the co-host option. To me that was unbelievably gracious, and I’m super grateful for you having done that because you know what? We get to talk at least every two weeks, even if we don’t see each other at conferences. You and I are on screen every two weeks and it’s awesome.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, again, don’t give me too much credit here. One, obviously I’ve known you and we’ve been living a parallel journey in this legal marketing agency owner thing, but so much of it was because again, this is a testament of the show when we are coming in here as two competing agencies, friendly competitors that are sharing this inside kind of perspective, to me that was the whole genesis of this was, and really to give you credit, it really came from Bedlam. Bedlam is really what inspired me to be like, Hey, you know what? He’s onto something here because you’re getting these two different perspectives from two different agency owners on the inside of the agency world. Now look, again, there’s also some uniqueness here because the way that we are aligned on so many of the things that we talk about and we don’t always agree on everything. But anyway, I’m super grateful that you accepted and there’s the story for whoever asked on YouTube. That’s how we came to launch our legal marketing.
Conrad Saam:
I think we don’t agree on tactical things, but I think the way we think about the market and the way you’re kinder than I am about this, but we hold the agency world in a level of disdain because it’s well earned. I mean, that was one of my early learnings at AVO was there are businesses that are predicated on preying on this stupidity, or not stupidity, I don’t even say ignorance or lack of knowledge of law firms. And that’s still out there. And I think that drives you. And I mentioned at the beginning, my dad started a business. The worst thing, one of the least American things you can possibly do in your big business is build your business model on screwing the small business. And there’s a lot of that. It is still going on. It changes flavor, but it’s still there. And you and I have this shared animosity towards people who do that.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
And on the other side of that coin is, is we both hold lawyers in very high regard. I mean, I’m still a licensed lawyer, but I know one of your core values at your company is like you love lawyers. I mean, we recognize the value of the work that lawyers do for society, and I think that comes out in a lot of how we talk about legal marketing and the types of firms that we choose to work with, and yada, yada yada. So there it is, Conrad’s origin story, how he landed at Mockingbird and how he landed at Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing also. And so now we will forever be emblazoned upon the internet servers of how we got here. And grateful to you, dear listener, for joining us for this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. As always, if you just landed here and you have no idea what you’re doing here, please do subscribe. If you’re a regular subscriber and you’re enjoying listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, we really do appreciate hearing from you whether you’ve got a topic for a show that you’d like us to cover, if you’d love to give us a review, we’d love hearing from you. Thank you so much. Until next time, Conrad Gyi farewell.
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Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Legal Marketing experts Gyi and Conrad dive into the biggest issues in legal marketing today.