Marketing

  • 13 Jun 2022 at 11:52 AM
  • /
  • Marketing

An ‘Unprecedented’ Project: How Above The Law Delivered Extraordinary Results In A Client Partnership

By

Above The Law logo vertical (1)With the onset of Covid, the legal profession entered extraordinary and uncharted territory.

Starting in the early days of the pandemic, a leading CLE provider partnered with Above the Law on sharing the message that the provider was up to the challenge of helping attorneys navigate all of the inevitable uncertainty and disruption.

The result of the collaboration was Unprecedented, a multi-channel media product that served as a hub for Above the Law’s comprehensive editorial coverage of the impact of the pandemic on the legal industry and integrated the CLE provider’s own relevant thought leadership.

The content published under the Unprecedented rubric covered the full spectrum of the pandemic’s impact: the emergence of remote and hybrid working models for law firms, changes affecting specific practice areas, the astonishing developments in the legal talent market, the accelerating adoption of new technologies, and much more.

Unprecedented functioned as a bespoke micro-site on Above the Law, a newsletter, and a podcast, all leveraging ATL’s social media presence to amplify the provider’s brand.

Over the 12-month run of Unprecedented, it generated over 876,000 visitors (from over 43,000 different law firms and companies), more than 50 million impressions, and over 32,000 website clicks for provider. The custom newsletter’s open rate was more than double the average for a sponsored campaign, and its click rate was more than triple this average.

Breaking Media’s campaign management team capped off the project by delivering a detailed report drawing on the company’s partnership with Bombora, the leading intent data company. The report included such metrics as the specific companies engaging the most frequently with the provider’s content, the top articles based on engagement, and even trending research topics among this audience.

By delivering value of this caliber and reaching the most U.S. lawyers of any publication, Above the Law works to maintain long-term, uniquely productive partnerships with all of its legal industry clients.

If you are interested in learning more about this program or other ways you can partner with Above the Law to craft an impactful marketing strategy, please contact Sales Manager Alicia Demonte.

Coming in 2019 – Above the Law Influencers Network

By

The average American adult spends more than 11 hours consuming digital media each day. Simultaneously, our attention span has diminished below eight seconds – equivalent to that of a goldfish. This is why every single legal media brand, and your uncle, is producing content.

Over the years, Above the Law (ATL) has expanded its coverage to meet this need. Our five editors publish, share, argue, and defend takes on the news that matters to lawyers and the legal industry. Our network of 100+ expert columnists shares ground-level viewpoints on law practice, law school, law firm management, in-house counsel, the business of law, technology and innovation, emerging practice areas, government, the courts, and public interest. Today, we curate and publish approximately 20 original articles per day, for an average of 10,000,000 pageviews and 1,300,000 unique readers per month. David, Elie, Staci, Joe, and Kathryn have built the largest distribution platform in the legal industry, and they do it every single day, month, and year.

We also understand the limits of the industry we serve. There are only 1,300,000 lawyers in the US, and 150,000 law students. There are only 24 hours in a day, and someone has to bill time. Our editors will continue the daily fight for media and distribution dominance, and we will deepen our focus into heavily-researched journalism and editorial to strengthen our relationships with readers.

In 2019, Above the Law will launch the ATL Influencers Network. The Influencers Network will provide a platform for legal industry thought leaders to:

  • Publish long-form editorial projects on the largest distribution platform in the legal industry,
  • Utilize the ATL research team’s capabilities with surveys, data collection, mining, and analysis,
  • Leverage the ATL editorial team’s storytelling expertise.

ATL Influencers will receive a column on Above the Law, payment for their work, and the opportunity to earn more money with Above the Law sponsored editorial and custom projects.

The ATL Influencers Network will be limited to 10 Influencers in its first year. Our influencers will be passionate about, and interested in building, an editorial projects in the following areas:

  • alternative legal service providers
  • big data, data analytics
  • business of law and law firm economics
  • emerging practice areas
  • in-house practice and operations
  • law firm innovation and change management
  • legal education for law students, and pre-law students
  • legal technology
  • legal research
  • solo and small law firm practice management

If you are interested in participating, please email Brian Dalton, VP of Special Projects bdalton [at] breakingmedia.com.

How Many Insiders Are There In Business?

By

Digiday published “Who’s winning at business news on the web” which details traffic, demographics, and ad rates of the five biggest business sites (in ascending order): The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business, Forbes, Business Insider, and Yahoo Finance. Business Insider made the largest jump, growing 80% traffic in one year to 40.8 million unique visitors per month. I’m in awe. And a little concerned. If BI were to grow another 80% this year, they would reach 73.44 million unique visitors per month.  Are there that many “insiders” in business?

Let’s look at the demographics and make one very broad – and non controversial – assumption: B2B marketers want senior-level buyers with a minimum $100K household income. None of the Top 5 business sites has a majority of readers over that threshold. BI’s audience had the lowest percentage at 37.4%. This means that 62.6%, or 25.5 million BI readers, fall outside of the sought-after B2B audience demographic.

$100K+ HHI Percent Site

Breaking Media runs independent brands exclusively focused in seven industry verticals. Our growth targets are tied to market penetration, not total uniques. The result is a smaller audience, but one that closely aligns with the community it serves.  Dealbreaker, Breaking Media’s financial site, is for investment bankers and hedge fund managers. Therefore the 73% of the audience is over $100K. In fact, 38% of the audience have a HHI over $250K.

We believe this niche media strategy best serves our advertisers.

Hsiaolei (pronounced “Chalet”) develops business and can be reached here.

  • 01 Jul 2010 at 2:37 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

The World Cup’s Marketing Winners and Losers, Part Two

By

Today, we finish out our rundown of the heroes and goats from the pitch and beyond.

Budweiser 2, Other brewers 2.
Budweiser will be happy to have moved on from Germany, where the official beer sponsor was soundly pounded as spulwasser (that’s dishwater to you) by a populace that takes its beer seriously and didn’t appreciate the lack of local brews at the games. In South Africa it seems to have scored a few more fans and won’t have done its developing world distribution any harm at all.

As you can see from the Nielsen numbers, however, Carlsberg managed to score too with its legends World Cup ad. And Dutch brewer Bavaria stole some headlines too with its 30-women in orange mini-dresses. However, booze is an overall winner during the World Cup, with bars jam-packed even in the avowedly-disinterested United States.

Hooray beer.

Read more »

  • 30 Jun 2010 at 12:15 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

The World Cup’s Marketing Winners and Losers

By

While we wait impatiently for Holland versus Brazil, let me bring you a few of the latest World Cup marketing scores.

Castrol 0, Visa 1.
If a sponsor’s checkbook opens on Sepp Blatter’s desk and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Castrol is not the only marketer to pony up tens of millions for official Fifa sponsorship rights, only to fail to leverage its outlay, by, you know, letting the rest of us know about it. (Did you visit Continental Tires’s site? Are you more likely to fly with Emirates than you were before the tournament? What about the chances that you buy a solar panel from Yingli Solar?)

Visa, one of many brand giants that sometimes seems to be applying the somewhat questionable “well, it’s a global event and we’re a global brand” logic to its sponsorship, at least found a few ways to activate its purchase by offering cardholders access to tickets in pre-sale events and making this thoroughly likable ad.

Read more »

  • 28 Jun 2010 at 12:19 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

Customer Service Invades Cannes with Best Buy’s Twelpforce

By

Every year the ad industry descends on Cannes, in the south of France, to hand out a few trophy cases of work for the best efforts of the year. In typical French fashion, the ad festival’s relationship with the real day-to-day business of marketing is flirting at best. That June week is a time for pink wine, pinker skin, long, sweaty nights of networking, and the celebration of big, flashy ad campaigns. Extended, careful rumination on marketing’s eternal questions — what makes people buy, or simply like, your brand — does not exactly flourish in that tropical sun.

One of those things that doesn’t get much attention is the hard business of customer service, something that changed this year that changed with the handing of the Titanium Lion Grand Prix to Best Buy and agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky for their work on Twelpforce. The program takes the business of customer service, so often confined to call centers located in the land of God knows where and the return counters in stores, and opens it up for all to see. Employing Twitter — hence the “Tw” — and open to hundreds of Best Buy employees who can tweet from a single account, it’s the mobilization of the retailer’s army of experts to deal with customer complaints or question as they’re expressed in real time.

Read more »

  • 17 Jun 2010 at 3:46 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

McKinsey Gets Social. Maybe Now CEOs Will Start Listening

By

I was initially unmoved by the news earlier this week that McKinsey is doing a joint venture with Nielsen leading the management consultancy to take over BuzzMetrics, one of the many firms out there that analyze what people are saying about companies online. There’s been so much acquisition action in that monitoring space over the years that it was hard to get excited.

But then this morning I read some late coverage of the announcement in the Financial Times that woke me up to the significance of the deal.

What the FT told me that I didn’t know is that NM Incite, as the new company will be called, is the first time McKinsey has attached its name to another company. “We have never done a joint venture of this magnitude before,” McKinsey’s Dan Singer told the FT. That detail got me thinking about how far the incredible popularity of social media has traveled upstream into corporations.

Read more »

  • 15 Jun 2010 at 4:27 PM

A Corporate Website That Doesn’t Suck, Courtesy of Crispin Porter and Bogusky

By

I never thought I’d say this, but I just saw a corporate website from an ad holding company that doesn’t completely suck.

For the uninitiated, the lion’s share of the largest ad agencies are owned by a handful of publicly-traded conglomerates with names like Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP that function largely as financial institutions. They’re not typically given much credit by creative types — except when they’re handing over buckets of cash and stock in exchange for an agency. These companies generally play the role of beancounters and aren’t known for adding much to the creative process. And, as you’d expect, their websites are usually lifeless.

A notable exception is the new internet home of MDC Partners, owner of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, one of the more famous agencies in the land. The main attraction on the relaunched site, designed by Crispin, is a map that tracks the comings and goings of key executives. So with a bit of clicking and sliding you could see that Alex Bogusky, the creative legend who now works at he MDC level, is splitting this week between New York and his headquarters in Boulder, Co. You can also see his recent Tweets and a profile. And of course the site also does all the other stuff you’d expect a corporate site to do: investor information, mission statement, etc.

Read more »

  • 26 May 2010 at 3:26 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

Nike Reminds Us that Brand Ads Can Be Worth the Investment

By

Nike’s “Write the Future” ad reminded me of something the vivacious magazine publisher Felix Dennis said in the mid-nineties about the then ad-bloated issues of the revenue-producing beast InStyle magazine. He called it the last roar of the T-Rex before the dinosaurs became extinct.

I’m not saying that either magazines or video ads are going to die, partly because that’s simply not the case and partly because it’s the wrong argument to make. But with so few strong brand-building commercials to watch these days, it is easy to imagine that this expansive and expensive commercial from Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam and director Alejandro Iñarritu is an endangered species. Name me one other ad of its quality since Google trotted out its simple, but beautiful little Parisian love story during the Super Bowl back in February?

Read more »

  • 13 May 2010 at 2:47 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

Public Relations Needs a Metric That Makes Sense. Ad Equivalents Isn’t It

By

This week one of our site editors received an email from a junior PR person asking for the site’s ad rate. The reason for the email dawned on me only after a while: this publicist was determining the ad value equivalent of a recent PR campaign, one component of which was a successfully pitched story on our site.

Advertising value equivalency (or AVE) is one of those things I’d read about, and even written about a bit, but had never seen in the wild. I’m sure I’ve been complicit in many a PR scheme, though no publicist has ever asked me for my publication’s ad rate. The fact that it’s happening in 2010 is mindblowing. PR, after all, is on the way up. Among the constant reminders that we live in a media-made world are the facts that Britain’s new prime minister is a former PR executive and more and more corporate activity seems to be judged by the amount of PR — or earned media — it gets. That goes double for the corporate activity known as advertising.

So to try and develop a correlation between the two just seems strange, all the more so when you look under the hood of ad equivalency. How the metric is applied varies wildly, but it’s generally based on a simple concept: What would news coverage have cost if it were purchased as an ad buy of comparable space (or time.) For years, the metric’s had PR people measuring column space in newspaper clippings mentioning their clients, counting seconds of TV news broadcasts, and, now, guesstimating online impressions in an effort to determine a reach. That reach is then multiplied by ad rates plucked from media kits. It doesn’t matter for the sake of the exercise that in practice those rates get discounted in negotiation. As you can imagine, this kind of conjuring results in inflation that Zimbabwe would look at in awe.

Read more »

« Older Entries