T.V. Advertising: What to Expect

Episode Notes

Transcript

Advertiser: So you’re an attorney, and you’ve decided to go out on your own. Now what? You need a plan and you’re not alone. Join expert host, Adriana Linares, and her distinguished guests on New Solo. Tune in to the lively conversation, as they share insights and information about how to successfully run your law firm, here on Legal Talk Network.

 

Adriana Linares: Hello and welcome to New Solo on Legal Talk Network. This is Adriana Linares. Today, I’m back in Orlando, and I have a co host with me today. Hey, Jason.

 

Jason Marsh: Hello, hello.

 

Adriana Linares: It’s good to have you back on.

 

Jason Marsh: It’s good to be back on.

 

Adriana Linares: Thanks for helping me out today. The reason I ask Jason to come on the show every once in a while is because he’s a marketing genius. He came to me one day and said, “Your friend, Conti Moore, she’s got these great TV commercials, and he was very impressed with them. And I thought, holy moly, there’s probably a lot of lawyers out there who want to learn the possibility of commercials and they probably think they’re incredibly expensive. Conti’s a solo in Orlando. Hi, Conti.

 

Conti Moore: Good afternoon!

 

Adriana Linares: Thanks for joining us, we really appreciate it.

 

Conti Moore: Thanks for having me.

 

Adriana Linares: I’m really excited to talk to you, because when Jason came, we were just talking generally as we do at a conference over meetings, and he said, “Your friend Conti Moore’s got these great commercials.” So before we launch into learning a little bit more about you and your commercials, I just want to take a few minutes to recognize our sponsor, that’s Solo Practice University. Make sure if you’re listening out there and you’re either a new solo or you’re an old solo and looking to get some more education and information about running your practice better, make sure you visit Solo Practice University. So, Conti, tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice and the types of things that you do to help people out in the central Florida area, or maybe you reach broader than central Florida.

 

Conti Moore: Actually, I just opened a new office in Cocoa, Florida, which is about an hour from here in Orlando. But I practice primarily family law and criminal defense, divorces, child support, modifications, all of that good stuff. So we stay busy here in central Florida.

 

Adriana Linares: That’s very good. You are a true solo with a couple of assistance, right?

 

Conti Moore: I have an associate attorney.

 

Adriana Linares: Oh, you do. Cool, tell us a little bit more, just about the practice in general.

 

Conti Moore: I have my associate attorney, Aleisha Hodo, she’s been out for maybe a year and a half, and we have two paralegals and a receptionist.

 

Adriana Linares: Wow, you guys are busy.

 

Conti Moore: We are.

 

Adriana Linares: Well, good! So I wanted to talk to you about your commercials. I’ve seen them and Jason, like I said, he was just very impressed. And when he and I were talking, I said those most be very expensive, she must be doing really good out there. He said, “You know, I talked to her about it and I was a little surprised.” It’s a great plan source, so tell us a little bit about what gave you the idea to do a commercial.

 

Conti Moore: I wanted to reach a broader market. I wanted to reach for people who weren’t just looking for me online, so I looked at doing television and radio. And if you compare the prices for radio and television, you really get more bang for your buck with television here in the central Florida area.

 

Jason Marsh: I take it you’re using Brighthouse and the local cable network here. And when they presented that to you, how did they calculate out that it actually is way cheaper to reach your per impression basis?

 

Conti Moore: Yeah, your spots.

 

Adriana Linares: What’s a spot?

 

Conti Moore: A spot is like if you have a radio ad, how many times it plays throughout a month. And so with – I don’t quote me on this – but with radio, I was getting half the spots that I would get with cable or with commercials. So radio couldn’t compete with Brighthouse as far as the amount of spots that I’m receiving. So right now at Brighthouse, I receive between 40 and 50 spots a week.

 

Jason Marsh: And do you have a sense of how many people are seeing each of those spots?

 

Conti Moore: I don’t know how many people are actually seeing them, but you can really target the market that you’re trying to reach.

 

Jason Marsh: So how did that happened? Did you approach Brighthouse or did they approach you?

 

Conti Moore: I approached Brighthouse.

 

Jason Marsh: And so when you approached them, what was the process that happened there in terms of identifying the audience that you want to target and then selecting the programming that you wanted to run your spots on?

 

Conti Moore: Well, my rep from Brighthouse, Robert, came out with me. He was really good as far as helping me figure out who I want to reach and what are my goals. Because what you see a lot of times in marketing is people try to reach everybody. It’s better to pick a niche; a niche.

 

Adriana Linares: We have this conversation on this show all the time.

 

Jason Marsh: It’s pronounced niche.

 

Adriana Linares: No, it is not. Jason says he likes to split the difference between niche and niche.

 

Conti Moore: Niche.

 

Jason Marsh: Niche. Go ahead.

 

Conti Moore: So I basically figured out that I don’t want to target everybody. I want to target a particular group, so I said men. So then what my rep did-

 

Jason Marsh: That really narrows it down.

 

Conti Moore: Well, you know, child support, divorce. I don’t want to target necessarily everyone, but who could I figure out and basically customize the commercial.

 

Jason Marsh: Are you targeting a specific age demographics? Obviously men’s going to encompass 50% of the population. But within that, how do you drill down and really fine tune in the audience you want to reach?

 

Conti Moore: When you first start off, you really don’t necessarily know. So you have to figure out what you want to try, and then if it’s not working, you can kind of tweak it. So we started off with just men generally, but then we tweaked it since then. Because what you see is with child support or with custody issues, sometimes the man will remarry and it’s his new wife or new significant other that will make the phone call to help fix the child support or help fix the custody. So I learned that through the process and so we tweaked it to where it’s not all on ESPN, but we have a little bit of Lifetime, a little bit of TLC in there as well to reach those significant others who want to make sure their husband or their boyfriend fixes whatever the issue is.

 

Jason Marsh: And how’s it working for you so far?

 

Conti Moore: It’s working well. With any sort of TV, radio, or billboards, it takes time. When I first started off with it, it was a little slow. But then it kind of ramped up, so you have to be patient with it. You need to-

 

Adriana Linares: I was just going to say so, patience is key.

 

Conti Moore: I had to commit 6 months. You have to make that kind of commitment. I will commit for 6 months but I’ll make a dime, but you have to be patient with it; you can’t expect a return immediately.

 

Jason Marsh: How do you measure what you’re seeing? What does success look like? How do you use some objective way to measure what’s happening?

 

Conti Moore: When people call in, we ask them how did they find us, so we always track that, so it’s great when you get a commercial: “I saw your commercial,” “Oh, well wonderful.” But sometimes, people may see your commercial and then they may call in after something’s happened and they Google search you and they tell you they found you on Google. You did search me there eventually but you first saw me on TV, so it’s really hard to monitor it. But for me, I looked at how many clicks I was getting on my website and I saw a major increase when I started to air my commercial.

 

Adriana Linares: Jason, this is probably a question you would normally ask. But when you say you saw more traffic on your website, was it more direct traffic? What is your website by the way?

 

Conti Moore: It’s ContiMooreLaw.com

 

Adriana Linares: So a direct hit would mean they directly typed in ContiMooreLaw.com or they searched specifically for your name as opposed to a general Google search looking for divorce lawyers and support.

 

Conti Moore: Correct.

 

Adriana Linares: Okay. Is that a good question, Jason?

 

Jason Marsh: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the fancy term for that is brand lift. Were you able to see that there was a lot more people hitting your website immediately after you were running a spot? Or was it more like a general thing that after a month or two of running the spots, you started to see your traffic doubling, tripling, et cetera?

 

Conti Moore: Generally, because I didn’t have the time to go in and look at when the hits were coming in, but I get my report and then I-

 

Adriana Linares: Your peak?

 

Conti Moore: Yeah, it’s gradually going up. So it’s continuing to do that.

 

Jason Marsh: How many months are you in now of your first 6 month commitment? It seems like it’s been 6 months that I’ve seen your ads airing in the Orlando area.

 

Conti Moore: I started in March. So 8 months.

 

Adriana Linares: Oh.

 

Jason Marsh: I need somebody else to do the math on that-

 

Adriana Linares: Fortunately we have a production assistant here doing the math. raising 8 toes in the air. So that’s good.

 

Jason Marsh: So you’re continuing now beyond the 6 months.

 

Conti Moore: I am.

 

Jason Marsh: And I assume that’s because you feel like what you’ve done, what you’ve spent so far has been successful and you’re seeing some return on that.

 

Conti Moore: Absolutely, absolutely.

 

Adriana Linares: So I was thinking, I’m kind of a nut, and I have analytics on my website when I can tell live; I use StatCounter.com and I can see. What’s funny is sometimes somebody will call me and they’ll see they were just looking at my website and I’ll log in real quick and I can see that they were there and see what pages they had gone through before they actually either called or if a lead form comes in, I’ll see if they visited. Anyway, if I were you, because I’m like a maniac, I would be sitting there waiting for the commercial to show and then I’d be logging in and just watching to see if anybody was actually hitting it, if there was a spike right after. I think that would be a very interesting statistic.

 

Conti Moore: I could, I might do that.

 

Adriana Linares: I could help you stick that right in there, it’s free; it’s a free tool. You load it right into the website, copy and paste a little code, and you can watch it live.

 

Conti Moore: Great!

 

Adriana Linares: I think Google Analytics – which Jason, of course, is a big fan of – does it give you live?

 

Jason Marsh: Yeah, there’s a lot of components to Google Analytics, but what you can’t do is go back and look at visits and then correlate to time. Or maybe you can, I’m not sure. But I think that’s an interesting thing to know to see if people are actually responding to the spot in real time and actually looking you up. But the other thing we wanted to ask you about was actually producing the TV commercial. It’s one thing to run the ads, but you’ve got to hae something to run in the first place. How did you do that? Because to me, it looks like a really well produced spot.

 

Conti Moore: Thank you. I worked with Domino Effect Productions. They’re not just in central Florida, they can help you wherever you need your commercial to be produced.

 

Jason Marsh: And what is the name of that company?

 

Conti Moore: Domino Effect Productions.

 

Jason Marsh: And you can use promo code Conti Moore if I decide to reach out to them?

 

Conti Moore: Yes, please do. And their phone number is (800) 553-4815.

 

Adriana Linares: Jason used to do commercials and he worked in New York at advertising agencies. So I’m telling you, when he said these were good, it was quite a compliment. So now, ask her the rest of the questions about the production, because it was even more interesting to find out.

 

Jason Marsh: Right, so anybody that’s ever been involved in any type of video production or TV production knows all the elements that go in there and it can become very expensive from locations to actors and talent and script and all of that. Could you just tell us a little bit of that? Who wrote the spot and how did you cast it, where did you shoot it, things like that. And then ultimately, what were the associated costs to doing it?

 

Conti Moore: Well, it wasn’t as expensive as most people think. You can get a commercial produced between $1,500 and $2,500 depending on what you’re looking to spend and what you’re trying to do with your commercial. As far as the cast or getting talent, my husband starred in my commercial and my paralegal’s son. So I fed them lunch and that was it. So they were my talent for lunch. They’re cheap talent, but they did a really good job. And if you have a good production company, you don’t need someone that’s trying to get an Oscar or anything. You just need someone who can basically play the role and it wasn’t too difficult.

 

Adriana Linares: When I saw the commercial, Jason told me about it and I saw it. I called him up and said, “Man, that’s quite a hunk Conti has on that commercial, she must have made a ton of money for him!” And he said, “I think it’s her husband!”

 

Conti Moore: Yep!

 

Adriana Linares: I said, “Well in that case, let me rephrase my statement. That’s quite a hunk Conti has as a husband!”

 

Conti Moore: Yeah, he’s really shy, but they were able to direct him to make sure that it looked good.

 

Jason Marsh: So the production people were able to just give him a sense of what he needed to do in a given shot, because it really does come off as looking very professional and scripted and high level to me.

 

Conti Moore: They’re a really good production company. We filmed everything here at my office. The living room scene is really my office, we moved some props around. And then we also filmed a portion of it at Lake Eola. So we didn’t have to rent any space or anything like that.

 

Adriana Linares: Do you also run them on your website? Have you clicked them into your website as well?

 

Conti Moore: Yes. If you go to my website, you’ll see, “Watch family law commercial,” click on it and the commercial is there.

 

Adriana Linares: Alright, well before we move on to our next segment, we’re going to take a quick break to hear message from our sponsors and we’ll be right back to talk a little bit more to Conti about this great topic.

 

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Adriana Linares: Welcome back to New Solo, I’m Adriana Linares. With me today is my co host, Jason Marsh, and we are talking to Conti Moore about how she has had quite a bit of success in commercials, regular TV commercials. So before we left off, we had gotten into producing the spot, we talked a little bit about the cost of the spot, her target audience, her actors and her actresses. What else do you want to ask Conti, Jason?

 

Jason Marsh: When we spoke earlier, you mentioned that you had plans to shoot another spot and this is going to be covering the same practice area or are you looking to expand to some different areas?

 

Conti Moore: I might expand. You have to have fresh content. So I have one commercial right now. I probably should have changed it maybe a couple of months ago, but we’re going to wait for the new year to do that, but you don’t want to have the same spot running over and over. If you look at a lot of the personal injury attorneys, they always have fresh spots. For every holiday, whatever else, they’re always changing it up. As a smaller firm, I can afford to have a fresh spot for every season. But we’re planning to change it up and we might focus on the same areas or focus on a different area. So with the commercials, right now in Orange County, I’m airing on the west side. They break it up into divisions. So what I might do is move that commercial that I’m airing now to the east side and start a new commercial on the west side with new content.

 

Jason Marsh: That’s an interesting way to mix it up and keep the ad creative fresh for the audience that you’re trying to reach.

 

Conti Moore: Right.

 

Adriana Linares: So you mentioned earlier that to produce the commercial it’s maybe $1,500 to $2,500 or $1,800 to $2,500 you said. Do you pay every time that spot airs or do you buy like a monthly package? And when you do that, when you move one commercial from a geographic area to another, if can you explain the cost structure a little bit, I think that will be interesting.

 

Conti Moore: They offer you packages and basically they can do whatever’s in your budget. So if you say a thousand dollars, if you pay a thousand dollars, you’re not going to get that many spots; you’re not going to see much of a return on your investment so it might take you longer. So with Robert, we sat down and discussed if you want to see a return, this is how much you should probably invest. So they had different packages. They had basketball packages, they have football packages; the sky’s the limit when it comes to these packages.

 

Adriana Linares: When you say basketball and football, are these NFL games, Orlando Magic games, or are they-

 

Conti Moore: All of it. So they have an NBA package, they have a college football college. And you can customize-

 

Jason Marsh: And just to clarify, you mentioned earlier you were buying a package with a select number of spots. But there’s no associated audience size that goes with each of those spots in terms of quantifying the number of dollars you’re paying versus the number of viewers that are potentially watching?

 

Conti Moore: Not really, we never had a discussion about the viewers. It was more so about who you were trying to target and then certain networks cost more to air on. So if you’re trying to air on Monday night football, that spot’s going to cost you a lot more than Sports Center at five in the morning. So it really depends on-

 

Jason Marsh: Did the word, “impressions,” ever come up in the conversation?

 

Conti Moore: I’m sure it did. But I don’t pay attention to it on a monthly basis, I’ll be honest with you. But yes, they talk about impressions, but I’m looking at the prime time spots.

 

Jason Marsh: The bigger picture.

 

Conti Moore: Yeah, what are my prime time spots and how much does it cost. And for me, Sports Center, that really worked well because you can get more spots on Sports Center and it doesn’t cost as much as airing on Monday night football or Thursday night football or Sunday night football.

 

Jason Marsh: I wonder if over a period of time, you’re able to attribute calls and volume and some success to specific programming, specific times of day whether it’s a network or a given show like Sports Center, and say I really want to just focus on running ads on Sports Center from 5 to 7 in the evenings and nothing else. Do they help you with that as well?

 

Conti Moore: Yeah, they do. What Robert had me do was had me send over addresses of people who retained me for the past year, and he gave me this really detailed package or report about who was my target audience. And it really shocked me because who I thought I was targeting were really not my target audience, that’s not the people who are actually retaining me. So they were able to help me realize with that report who I had to focus on, and we actually just tweaked our networks.

 

Jason Marsh: Because we were talking about that earlier before we recorded the podcast and I was curious. Obviously you’re targeting family law type of cases. But because your name’s getting out there, you’re conceivably getting people Googling your name for anything and calling up and saying, “Hey, some guy owes me money,” or any sort of random thing. How much of that do you get versus the actual types of clients that you reach? And I know a certain amount of that’s expected.

 

Conti Moore: For the commercial, I’m getting people who actually need my services. The question is if they can they afford to hire me. Right now I do 15 minute free consultations, so I can kind of weave through those people pretty quickly. But I don’t have random people calling me from the commercial just for criminal law or estate planning.

 

Jason Marsh: So it’s all pretty targeted.

 

Conti Moore: Yeah, it is.

 

Jason Marsh: In other words, the audience you’re targeting is really the audience you’re getting.

 

Conti Moore: Right.

 

Adriana Linares:  That’s pretty impressive.

 

Jason Marsh: That is.

 

Conti Moore: Yeah. I’m getting that. But again, the issue is not everybody can afford to retain me, they want free advice-

 

Adriana Linares: There’s a little bit of fluff in there.

 

Conti Moore: Yeah.

 

Adriana Linares: But that’s pretty good, so that means the messaging and whoever wrote the spot-

 

Conti Moore: They’ve done a good job.

 

Jason Marsh: It sounds like the plan that you’re getting is pretty well organized because it is a tricky thing to do, particularly on TV, because TV appeals to such a wide audience. But it does sound like it’s working.

 

Conti Moore: My suggestion to anyone who’s thinking about doing it is pick one area of law. You can not have an overall, we do everything type commercial. Pick one thing and focus on that and then see what results you get from that. Focus on a particular area of law.

 

Jason Marsh: Or niche.

 

Conti Moore: Yes.

 

Adriana Linares: I was just going to ask you, are there any things that you’ve learned specifically that you could say don’t do this, definitely do this, here’s something I wish I hadn’t done or here’s something I’m really glad that I did?

 

Conti Moore: For me I just really sat down with Robert from Brighthouse and just talked about what my goals were and what I wanted to focus on. So I’m glad that I didn’t do the whole catch all, I’m your lawyer, hire me for whatever your legal needs may be.

 

Jason Marsh: I agree with that.

 

Conti Moore: I think also it was important that we actually hired a makeup artist for men too to make sure that your complexion and everything is at it’s best and make sure you coordinate your wardrobe and make sure you look professional. So when picking your wardrobe, you want to make sure you incorporate your firm colors. It’s all about branding. My color is teal, so you’ll see a lot of teal in my commercial. You’ll see it at the very end where they put my phone number. Make sure that they also put your website on there as well. That’s really important because you want people to actually go and look at your website after they see the commercial.

 

Adriana Linares: So you’ve got to have a good website.

 

Conti Moore: Yes.

 

Jason Marsh: What about a tracking phone number? Do you have a specific tacking phone number in the ad?

 

Conti Moore: I didn’t because I’ve dealt with that with my SEO and my pay per click, and it was important for me for my number to be the number that people remember and that they call. I had a different number for different marketing purposes before, but I decided to stick with our main number.

 

Adriana Linares: So on the commercials, it’s got your website, it has your phone number. Do you also include your email or address or any other information? What are the two or three pieces of information that you want to make sure to include?

 

Conti Moore: Oh, that’s a good question. Your phone number and your website.

 

Jason Marsh: And what about your tagline, “Stress less, choose Moore.” How did you come up with that?

 

Conti Moore: One of my interns actually came up with that. So my last name is Moore, and he was like, “Stress less, choose Moore!” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He said, “That’s your slogan!” And I thought that was awesome.

 

Jason Marsh: And you spell that with two O’s? Choose Moore?

 

Conti Moore: Yes.

 

Adriana Linares: How did you learn so much about branding? You’re a young attorney, I mean you’re not an old attorney but you’re not a young attorney, but you are very focused on your marketing efforts. The fact that you even say it’s part of our branding, we don’t hear every lawyer saying that sort of stuff. How did you learn this?

 

Conti Moore: It’s hard, I don’t know. I don’t want to say it just came to me.

 

Adriana Linares: You can say, “I’m a genius!”

 

Conti Moore: But I mean, as a lawyer, you can get referrals by attorneys, which require a lot of networking, or you can invest in marketing. So for me, I did the networking at first, but now I’m kind of turning towards the marketing; the Seo, the pay per click, the commercials, to try to get people who I don’t know to contact me. So you just do whatever you can.

 

Adriana Linares: That’s great. Well this has been a very interesting interview.

 

Jason Marsh: Yeah, this has been fantastic, a lot of great information.

 

Adriana Linares: Well, it looks like we’ve reached the end of our program unfortunately. But I just want to make sure and thank you, Jason Marsh, for helping me out. Let our listeners know how they can learn about your genius marketing services.

 

Jason Marsh: Yeah, sure. They can find me on Marsh8.com. Get me on Twitter, @_JasonMarsh, and they can subscribe to my mailing list and get lots of good stuff at Marsh8.com/subscribe.

 

Adriana Linares: And Conti, we can’t thank you enough. I know how busy you must be and giving this information and sharing it with other attorneys is really very gracious of you. Tell our listeners how they can see your commercial on your website and learn more about you.

 

Conti Moore: Go to ContiMooreLaw.com, and if they have any questions, call me at the office: (407) 831-0203.

 

Jason Marsh: And use promo code, Legal Talk Network.

 

Adriana Linares: For all you listeners who’d like to learn more about what you’ve heard today, make sure you visit New Solo on the Legal Talk Network and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook and subscribe via RSS and iTunes. That brings us to the end of our show. I’m Adriana Linares and thank you for listening. Join us next time where we’re actually going to sit with Conti one more time and talk about the amazing arrangement she has as a solo with another solo, Barbara Leach, and that’s going to be another really great episode as well. So thank you so much; and remember: you’re not alone, you’re a new solo.

 

Advertiser: Thanks for listening to New Solo with host Adriana Linares. Tune in again to learn more about how to successfully run your new practice. Solo, here, on Legal Talk Network.

 

The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own, and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by, Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries.  None of the content should be considered legal advice.  As always, consult a lawyer.

 

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