Interesting comments, thanks, David.
You made some insightful comments, about branding and Yellow Pages advertising, as well as commenting about the Lawyers Weekly article. Here are answers to some of the questions you pose.

First, regarding the Yellow Pages haiku — I think you’re right, I wasn’t writing Haiku but actually Senryu, its more satirical, less sentimental, lesser-known cousin.

Here’s another Yellow Pages Senryu attempt:
Suited lawyers grin
Mocking tragedy and pain.
Directory ads.

Re the Red Jackal ads and the Lawyers Weekly article, they did a good job with the piece, as they usually do — LW is a well-researched, well-written, high-quality publication. That’s not to say that they got every single fact correct, invariably snippets get edited for space. But the larger point was thoroughly accurate — Lorne had just spun off his divorce practice from his partner because he sought to move up a tier from a practice targeting the blue-collar community to a more affluent market with larger, more sophisticated cases. His Yellow Pages ad had a typical design and a photo of him at work. And he was doing great, business was very good. We created new materials for him and shortly thereafter he told me he was working seven days a week, had hired an associate and a couple of paralegals already, and still could barely keep up with the calls.

This was all created before Red Jackal existed, when it was under the banner of Ross Fishman Marketing. The $20,000 figure quoted perhaps included the purchase price of the Yellow Pages space; I think we charged him $5000 or so to do the original work. It was in part due to his remarkable success that we found an opportunity to spin off this type of advertising into a new company, YP-Ads.com, now called Red Jackal Ads, to offer these same Yellow Pages ads to other progressive divorce firms in other markets. Yes, his ad was initially designed as a beautiful two-page spread, but he decided that he only had the budget for a one-page ad, so we reformatted it into a single page. And it worked great.

You also question how a sales rep or law firm would know that an ad is bringing in more than its share of work. Does a law firm know that the calls are going to someone else’s ad in particular? No, obviously not. But firms certainly know when their flow of Yellow Pages cases has declined, and if it’s not making financial sense any longer, they pull out of the directory — and that’s not good for a commissioned sales rep’s business.

And you comment skeptically that this will inevitably lead to “…higher profits for some lawyers, without an increase in the quality of legal services”? Well, yes, that’s our goal. We’re an ad agency, not Legal Aid; we can’t practice law or control the quality of the legal services of our clients. Our specific goal is to generate significantly higher profits for some lawyers — our clients — just as mega-ad agency Leo Burnett’s goal has long been to generate more sales and higher profits for Pillsbury using the Dough Boy. Hey, it’s the American way.
Ross

Interesting comments, thanks, David.
You made some insightful comments, about branding and Yellow Pages advertising, as well as commenting about the Lawyers Weekly article. Here are answers to some of the questions you pose.

First, regarding the Yellow Pages haiku — I think you’re right, I wasn’t writing Haiku but actually Senryu, its more satirical, less sentimental, lesser-known cousin.

Here’s another Yellow Pages Senryu attempt:
Suited lawyers grin
Mocking tragedy and pain.
Directory ads.

Re the Red Jackal ads and the Lawyers Weekly article, they did a good job with the piece, as they usually do — LW is a well-researched, well-written, high-quality publication. That’s not to say that they got every single fact correct, invariably snippets get edited for space. But the larger point was thoroughly accurate — Lorne had just spun off his divorce practice from his partner because he sought to move up a tier from a practice targeting the blue-collar community to a more affluent market with larger, more sophisticated cases. His Yellow Pages ad had a typical design and a photo of him at work. And he was doing great, business was very good. We created new materials for him and shortly thereafter he told me he was working seven days a week, had hired an associate and a couple of paralegals already, and still could barely keep up with the calls.

This was all created before Red Jackal existed, when it was under the banner of Ross Fishman Marketing. The $20,000 figure quoted perhaps included the purchase price of the Yellow Pages space; I think we charged him $5000 or so to do the original work. It was in part due to his remarkable success that we found an opportunity to spin off this type of advertising into a new company, YP-Ads.com, now called Red Jackal Ads, to offer these same Yellow Pages ads to other progressive divorce firms in other markets. Yes, his ad was initially designed as a beautiful two-page spread, but he decided that he only had the budget for a one-page ad, so we reformatted it into a single page. And it worked great.

You also question how a sales rep or law firm would know that an ad is bringing in more than its share of work. Does a law firm know that the calls are going to someone else’s ad in particular? No, obviously not. But firms certainly know when their flow of Yellow Pages cases has declined, and if it’s not making financial sense any longer, they pull out of the directory — and that’s not good for a commissioned sales rep’s business.

And you comment skeptically that this will inevitably lead to “…higher profits for some lawyers, without an increase in the quality of legal services”? Well, yes, that’s our goal. We’re an ad agency, not Legal Aid; we can’t practice law or control the quality of the legal services of our clients. Our specific goal is to generate significantly higher profits for some lawyers — our clients — just as mega-ad agency Leo Burnett’s goal has long been to generate more sales and higher profits for Pillsbury using the Dough Boy. Hey, it’s the American way.
Ross

Are you fishing for compliments, Marie?  I like you approach, but would not trust myself with a razor blade near lawyer ads.  Good old rip-and-tear would work for me.

Are you fishing for compliments, Marie?  I like you approach, but would not trust myself with a razor blade near lawyer ads.  Good old rip-and-tear would work for me.

Would you think less of me if you knew that upon receiving my annual copy of our local phone book, one of the first things I do is to take a razor blade and cleanly slice out all the full page and two page attorney ads. Because those ads get in the way and there are too many to thumb through when trying to find a lawyer’s number.

Would you think less of me if you knew that upon receiving my annual copy of our local phone book, one of the first things I do is to take a razor blade and cleanly slice out all the full page and two page attorney ads. Because those ads get in the way and there are too many to thumb through when trying to find a lawyer’s number.