Law Schools

Law Schools + The Internet = Embarrassing Screenshots

Law school's advertising crops up in really embarrassing places.

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Mad Men made advertising seem easy and fun. Drink all day and spout out something about the virtues of shaving cream, and you can start screwing every diner waitress in sight!

That thought apparently occurred to someone at Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School, because they’ve embarked on an advertising campaign that screams amateurism so loud that NCAA Athletic Directors are starting to notice.

We reported on this back in February when Cooley managed to place a banner ad… on Above the Law. At the time, Elie cut Cooley a small measure of slack, recognizing that the school had — albeit stupidly — just bought a bunch of ad impressions on “law-related sites” without realizing that would probably land them atop Cooley Haterz Club Local 101:

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.

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.

That was definitely giving them too much slack, because Cooley appears to be employing an Internet advertising strategy known as “retargeting,” with hilarious results. Retargeting is just a fancy name for that phenomenon where an ad seems to follow you around the Internet. If you look at the homepage of a cruise line, get ready to see ads for cruises over and over again over the next few days or weeks. That’s because advertisers who think you might window shop a bit before pulling the trigger use cookies to tag you and then every time you visit a page using that ad network — regardless of the “bin” — the ad network will display the the ad for that product in front of you because they assume they have you on the line.

How does this matter? Because it sets up incredibly embarrassing screenshots like these, where my search for a children’s website so I could find knock-knock jokes appropriate to tell a 4-year-old niece — because apparently her parents frowned on my go-to joke about the three lesbians, an Anglican Vicar, and industrial-grade fiberglass — got plastered with Cooley ads because my job forces me to visit their website all the time:

Or maybe this isn’t retargeting. Maybe Cooley actually feels “children telling knock-knock jokes” is the hot demographic. Cooley’s like Joe Camel, gotta get ’em hooked on bad ideas young.

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And when you think about it, the ad kind of is a self-contained knock-knock joke.

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Western Michigan Law School.
Western Michigan Law School who?
No… sorry, Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Tried to trick you there. Sorry for wasting your time.

Earlier: Cooley Law Can’t Even Buy An Ad Without Screwing Up

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