NY Times Features Foley Hoag Advertising Campaign
In a major PR coup for the Boston law firm Foley Hoag, the New York Times ran an article on the law firm's upcoming advertising campaign, entitled "Images to Help Law Firms Recast Their Image."
The ads will run in Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal, on the Web, and on dioramas at Logan Airport in Boston and at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
One ad — with the tag line “Innovate and Accelerate” — has a man wearing a set of paper wings, vintage aviator goggles and a white scarf, jumping off a chair in a Gothic-style auditorium, as if in flight. Click here to see the full-size ad in a PDF file.
The creative centerpiece of the campaign is a series of ads featuring images by noted fashion and editorial photographer Rodney Smith, whose work has appeared in New York Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. Instead of touting case wins or deals completed, the ads – composed of arresting black-and-white images of formally dressed men and women in unlikely settings – are meant to provoke business people to stop and consider how they view big-picture challenges and plot their paths to success.
Mark E. Young, a lawyer who is Foley Hoag’s chief marketing officer, did research that showed that corporate clients hire law firms based on two main reasons: the firm’s understanding of the client’s business and its responsiveness to clients’ concerns. Foley Hoag was willing to increase its marketing budget substantially to create a campaign that sounded these themes, Mr. Young said, although he would not say how much the firm spent.
Kudos to Allan Ripp of Ripp Media/Public Relations in New York for the publicity coup. You can reach Allan at 212-262-7477 and Arippnyc@aol.com.
I wonder if such an ad brings any business in. It's evident that, unline in most of industries, law/consulting firms don't use "selling" advertisements. Is it really clever?