Law Schools

Cooley Law Can't Even Buy An Ad Without Screwing Up

Cooley Law is advertising on Above the Law?

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Even if you understand how advertising works on the internet, the following picture is going to disturb you.

It bothered me, I almost choked on a soft taco when I saw it.

And so I want to make sure to put the image in context for our readers: kind of like talking your kid through sex education so he doesn’t have to learn about fisting from the streets.

Here we go, I’ve highlighted the important part.

Yep, that’s an ad for Cooley Law running on Above the Law.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Cooley is running an ad campaign on Above the Law. Don’t get me wrong, if Cooley wanted to buy ads with us, I’d gladly take the money. I’d take the money and put a new roof on my house, and for the next 30 years whenever I was not wet I would think “LOL Cooley.”

Cooley is running what’s called a network ad. Above the Law gets a ton of impressions. We can’t possibly sell them all ourselves because we are leanly staffed and there are only so many people who want to talk to all of you assholes. Our excess inventory gets dumped in a bin with a bunch of other impressions from other sites, and we get paid a nominal fee for our leftovers. On the other end are advertisers who want to reach people who “bid” for different bins of impressions. The highest bidder gets whatever bin our leftovers are in, money changes hands, you put up Ad Blocker, I don’t get my roof.

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In defense of Cooley, they likely didn’t want and wouldn’t have bid on our bin if they had known we were in there. It’s the ad networks that are the worst, making grand promises to advertisers about where brands can be placed without really knowing anything about the business or the readers behind the excess inventory being sold. Cooley was probably told that their network buy would reach X million users “interested about law.” Nobody told them, and they evidently never bothered to ask, who those “law-interest-ers” might be.

Of course, the general ineffectiveness of network ad buys is why most (say it with me now) RESPECTABLE LAW SCHOOLS won’t waste their money on it. Smart law schools don’t think of “branding” as scrawling their name across any edifice that will have it. Smart law schools want to control their brand. Because at the end of the day, the brand is what adds value to a law school diploma.

Cooley treats its brand and its reputation like a cheap party favor, then wonders why its students get bashed like a piñata. They’ve named a baseball stadium, for God’s sake. A minor league stadium of course. The team is literally called the Lugnuts. Branding! The Lugnuts play at Cooley Law.

Buying network ads is like going to the Dollar Store for advertising, so of course Cooley is all over it. That’s how the school thinks of itself, you tell me what they think of their graduates.

There are some products that make sense for the kind of mass reach advertising you get on ad networks or the subway or whatever. Seamlessweb springs to mind. No matter what I’m doing, I’m probably hungry. If a banner pops up while I’m reading Above the Law that says “get food here,” I might notice. Lots of products make sense: beer, lube, a long lasting battery. Sounds like a fun night.

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But legal education is not a “consumer” good. It’s not for everybody. Selling legal education like one might sell a used car is exactly the problem that has caused so many law graduates to make so many terrible decisions. What kind of law students are you getting if they decided to check out your school because they saw your ad on the subway?

But hey, there’s probably some guy in Cooley’s marketing department who wants to thanks me right now. I just gave them “free” advertising! Well, you know, you get what you pay for.

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