Art and artifice combine for Best of Show:
International Lawyers Network's Multi-Media Campaign

Getting 5,000 lawyers in 70 countries to pay attention to anything like an ad campaign defines the words "ultimate challenge," according to LMA Your Honor judges. Yet that is just what this multi-media campaign delivered by the International Lawyers Network (ILN) set out to do. It has met with "Super Bowl" success so far, and the judges have honored this program with Best of Show for its boldly creative and deft approach.

No newsprint ads, no direct mail, no press releases or interviews...this campaign takes a radically different visual twist. With a goal to convince the 85% less-active lawyers in the International Lawyers Network to become active, the campaign  needed a simple message with a stop-you-in-your-tracks visual to hook the target audience of bright, overworked and timecramped lawyer members. And the budget was limited.

“We needed to grab them quickly with a powerful, unexpected image and tell our entire story within five seconds – and get them to talk about it with their peers,” according to ILN spokespeople.

How to do it? The creators came up with ideas for life-sized, out-of-the-box designs made of sticky plastic that could be applied to a variety of surfaces without damage. These would be two-dimensional figures so large and theatrical they startled the passer-by and made him or her stop, take note and tell someone else.

The final selection of adhesivebacked images took shape as people of various nationalities and career modes, out-of-proportion and representative hats, and renderings of exotic travel destinations. These “trompe l’oeil,” or visual deceits, would be applied to bathroom mirrors, elevator doors, even interior walls of a building or law office.

The hats, a representative sample of international headdresses, were applied to restroom mirrors and positioned high enough to “fit” the heads of the onlookers. The message, “Imagine you need a lawyer in (that representative country),” gave clarity to the surprise, out-of-context reflection in the mirror.

Illusory "people" affixed to mirrors smiled at bathroom visitors, reminding them that “the ILN is always with you, worldwide. www.ILN.com.” These sticky images resembled people from all over the world.

There were more. A set of elevator doors – cloaked in plastic sheeting adorned with words and images reminiscent of various countries (camels for Egypt, for example) – reminded the onlooker of his or her membership in International Lawyers Network. Mock, life-sized doorways, slightly ajar and leading to exotic, mock locales, were “affixed” to various interior walls.

Initial approval was thunderous, nearly 100%. “Our first presentation was in Istanbul, to the European regional meeting,” said the group’s representative. "These lawyers are conservative; marketing is not something they have adopted as readily as U.S. firms have. The presentation to 50 attorneys from 35 European and Asian countries led to an excited discussion and far-reaching ideas about other applications for the products.”

The following meeting in Phoenix gained the same swell of enthusiasm – complete buy-in by the group and a desire to send the materials electronically to kick off the program.

The campaign’s entire budget was a fraction of a global print/media/ad undertaking of comparable scope: $20,000 took care of interviews, research, creative development and production.

Click here for video of the award presentation and an interview with the winner.