This Orrick Ad Makes You Want To Join Biglaw. Or Kill Yourself.

This Biglaw ad is a failure unless the goal was unintentional comedy.

German aesthetics can be a bit of a mystery. If you’ve ever tried to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and thought, “wow this is great!” then you were super high. At the artistic level, the culture prides itself on the weird and abstract, which is how you end up with 30-minute shots of old men eating raw bacon that’s supposed to represent the Revolutions of 1848.

But apparently this can also bleed into their legal advertising. Our friends at Roll On Friday found this Orrick ad in the German legal magazine Juve.

It’s entirely unclear what Orrick is going for here. Most jobs that demand 2000-3000 billable hours per year of their employees don’t call attention to the fact that “Life is too short!” It’s also why Army recruiting posters say, “Be All That You Can Be” and not “Amputations And PTSD Are Things.” It just dampens the enthusiasm. Better taglines for this guy’s picture might be, “Money can buy happiness!” or “Face it, you’d kill your harpy of a wife if you spent more time at home!”

Roll On Friday notes that the only way to keep the tagline requires flipping the image:

What it should show is an ancient Tony Blackburn or a dessicated Annie Nightingale hobbling towards a data room with undisguised glee, and also sadness because they have finally realised that their dream was always due diligence, and now it’s too late, death has their necks in its steely grip.

If anyone knew who Tony Blackburn or Annie Nightingale were that might work. But the biggest problem with this ad is in the details:

The second problem is that the needle is not on the record, which means the music he is hearing is only in his head, and he has lost his marbles.

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So to break down this ad, it seems to be telling its German audience to sign up for a career at Orrick and be rapt with sorrow and dementia, but with enough money to buy a pretty sweet mix table.

Orrick makes sad, self-defeating advert [Roll On Friday]

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