Your ad campaign is barely legal. Now what?

By Gonzalo López Martí    – Creative director, etc. /  LMMiami.com  

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Clay Shirky

• Your garden variety advertising creative has enemies aplenty.
• Real and imaginary.
• Focus groups.
• Planners.
• The client.
• The client’s significant other.
• Conference calls.
• Punctuality.
• Personal hygiene.
• The list goes on and on.
• However, the present day creative’s worst nemesis is…
• The client’s legal department.
• In the US Hispanic market, to make matters worse, legal departments populated by monolingual professionals usually draw their verdicts and make their perplexing recommendations based on so-called “back translated” copy.
• What can I say.
• Lawyers, like the rest of us, need to justify their existence and their salaries.
• They muddy the waters to make them look deeper.
• Like CPAs.
• They’re on the clock.
• How can a campaign be protected from the legal menace lurking at the end of the rocky road to approval?
• —-Option 1: demand a second opinion.
• Yours truly has had his share of wheeling and dealing with attorneys throughout his personal and professional life and, lemme tell ya, all lawyers are different.
• You can bring the exact same issue to ten different solicitors and every single one of them will have a different POV.
• Or nine for that matter.
• When was the last time the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court agreed on anything?
• These folks are supposed to be the highest judicial authorities of the land and yet they can’t seem to see eye to eye on a parking ticket.
• YUP.
• The law is ALWAYS open to interpretation.
• In short, when your cubicle dweller of a legal advisor attempts to sell you his or her opinion as infallible gospel, do NOT hesitate to challenge it, push back, call it into question and demand a second opinion.
• —-Option 2: make them understand that it is in their best interest to think and operate like so-called personal injury attorneys.
• Not like a Erin-Brockovich like selfless Don Quijote fighting lost causes.
• Not at all.
• Quite the contrary: to think and operate with their very own personal benefit as a priority.
• Point is, personal injury lawyers (aka ambulance chasers) typically work on contingency fees: they only win if the client wins.
• Yeah, they are the bottom feeders of the legal world, generally frowned upon by their colleagues.
• To their credit, at least, they have skin in the game.
• I’ll take an ambulance chaser over a divorce lawyer any day.
• Think of it, what’s the point of an amicable divorce when you can have your client drown in protracted litigation wars over child support, alimony et al, thus inflating your billable hours with no end in sight?
• A divorce lawyer working on contingency?
• Mmm… why not.
• But back to advertising.
• Correspondingly, the minions populating your client’s legal department believe it is not their problem if your beloved campaign sees the light of day or not.
• They are on the clock, they’ll get paid regardless.
• Really?
• They should understand that if their employer/client doesn’t sell its products or services, it simply won’t be able to pay its attorneys salaries or fees.
• Easier said than done, I know.
• Attorneys, then again, are experts at collecting from deadbeats.
• “Who’s gonna win the fight tonight?” a famous boxer was once asked by a reporter.
• “The promoter”, was the pugilist’s deadpan response.
• In my home country of Argentina, possibly in many other Latin countries too, there’s a running phrase that goes something like: “serás lo que debas ser o serás abogado.”
• Roughly translated as “you’ll be what you’re meant to be, or you’ll be a lawyer”.
• Which means, of course, that law is, more often than not, the career choice by default of folks who have no particular vocation or life calling.
• If I were a corporate lawyer I’d probably meddle with my employer’s ad campaigns too, just for the sake of having a respite of much needed fun in my painstakingly boring workdays.
• A personal grudge agaisnt lawyers?
• Who?
• Me?
• What makes you think that?
• My best friends are all high flyin’ attorneys.
• Let the hate mail begin.
• And the libel suits.