About a month ago, Ron “The Hammer” Colton decided that he was going to start running television advertisements to drum up some new business. A personal injury attorney based in Knoxville, Tennessee, Colton has always been told that he was made for television. According to local rumor, Colton’s nickname is the result of his reputation as a maestro with the jury. Defense attorneys in Tennessee are consistently warned that if you have a case against Colton that goes to closing argument, he will drop “the hammer” and make sure a monster verdict comes raining down.
Colton’s TV move was prompted by the arrival of another big-name personal injury attorney in the Knoxville area. He decided that if he wanted to remain the big fish in town, he needed to raise his visibility. Unfortunately, his plans took an immediate wrong turn when he decided to use a client’s cousin to develop his television spot. The cousin, an alleged “TV producer from New York” was adamant that Colton needed all of the bells and whistles to get people to pay attention to his ad. The result? Colton is wishing the ad never happened.
The spot starts with a siren and then quickly cuts to “The Hammer” standing beside a pile of smoking wreckage from a car accident. As people struggle to extract themselves from the automobiles and safety personnel descend on the scene, Colton calmly pitches his 1-800 number. The editing makes Colton look callously ignorant of the human drama unfolding around him. The shot then flips to a bandaged client talking to Colton before the word negligence appears on the screen in all capital letters. Not a second later, a huge hammer obliterates the word negligence and its shatters into a million dollar signs.
The next scene shows Colton in an operating room discussing the life-changing consequences of medical malpractice. As the doctor appears to be delivering a child, Colton walks across the screen ticking off his largest med mal verdicts. There’s not even a nod to the soon to be new parents in the delivery room. Finally, the 30 second spot ends with Colton hovering over a scene straight from the movie “Independence Day” with the phrase “When the world wrongs you, fight back with the hammer” flashing on the screen.
“I tried to edit out most of the ‘over the top’ stuff,” explained a defensive Colton when Litination reached him for comment earlier today, “but Vinnie was insistent that we needed to go big." When asked if he thought this spot would harm his practice, Colton was defiant. "Are you kidding me? Any press is good press my friend; nothing's going to keep 'The Hammer' out of action." Despite the puffery, most that have seen the ad are confident that Colton's next round of advertising is almost certainly going to be limited to print or radio.
1 comments:
Do you have a link to the ad or is it online?
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