Looking for a lawyer to get you bundles of cash? You might want to hire the firm that shows stacks of $100s across its ad.
"Millions of dollars recovered for accident victims," it reads.
Or the one with photographs of the back of an ambulance, wrecked cars and a hospital bed.
"We get the compensation you deserve," trumpets this one, in the Verizon yellow pages for Westchester and Putnam counties.
Thirty years ago, advertising like this would have been scandalous, a professional breach of good taste, even ethics. Today, it's commonplace. Lawyers, accountants, doctors and hospitals all market themselves – some decorously, some with exclamation points.
"Advertising works for any field," said Philip L. Franckel, a lawyer in Roslyn, Long Island, who now licenses a toll-free telephone number, 1-800-HURT-911, to other lawyers. "I don't care what you're selling, advertising always works."
Some marketing consultants urge caution. Bruce W. Marcus, who tailors his advice to lawyers and accountants, argues that a hard sell works poorly for them.
"Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, 'Gee, what a great day, a wonderful day to get an audit.' 'Gee, what I really need to do is sue somebody today.' Doesn't happen that way," said Marcus, a senior adviser to the Bay Street Group in Dobbs Ferry.
A marketing campaign might persuade someone to buy a lollipop, but no one not already looking for a divorce lawyer would decide to leave their marriage because of aggressive advertising, he said.
"That's your difference in professional services," he said. "In professional services, you're dealing with a situation, you're not selling people something that they don't want or hadn't wanted or didn't need. People go to lawyers and go to accountants because they need their services."
What a professional firm can do, he said, is demonstrate what it has to offer, what it has accomplished in the past.
"Publicity works very well, articles work very well, seminars are really a selling tool," Marcus said.
Lawyers in particular were for a long time barred from advertising. Then in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court in a case called Bates v. State Bar of Arizona ruled that advertising by lawyers was a form of commercial speech that deserved some First Amendment protections. But state-by-state restrictions still apply.
Some potential clients and patients said they would look askance at heavy advertising.
"I personally don't like marketing by professionals, like lawyers or doctors," said Narayan S. Murthy, 55, the chairman of the computer science department at Pace University. "It says something negative about them. It says they don't have a good business."
Murthy and his colleague, 58-year-old Daniel Farkas, said they would favor recommendations over ads. Or, said Farkas, a professor of information systems at Pace, "Probably I'd look on the Web; I'd look through the professional society."
Cookie Rosman is about to have knee surgery and the Scarsdale woman said she relied on word-of-mouth whether from friends or relatives.
"At my stage in life, a lot of friends have had replacements, knee replacements and other things like that."
Today doctors and hospitals advertise as a matter of course, even on New York City subway placards, but Kenneth Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said he thought that there were few cut-throat campaigns – "Come to my hospital and don't go to the other guy's.
"We deal in life and death situations," he said. "We deal in trying to minimize pain and suffering. Those are all very sober-minded products. It's not like we're talking about a new set of clothes."
But hospitals will promote deluxe maternity suites and other amenities, as Sound Shore Medical Center did recently.
"The more comfortable you can make someone the better, but for the most part if somebody's coming in for a heart transplant or something really serious I think he or she would be a lot less concerned about what amenities we offer than the quality of care," said Sal Schiliro, the hospital's director of media relations. "It depends upon on what you're here for."
Recommendations are exceptionally important in a field like health care, but advertising has a role to play, particularly in providing information, said Pradeep Gopalakrishna, a marketing professor at Pace University's Lubin School of business.
"Consumers are really hungry for information," he said.
Franckel advocates a bold strategy for lawyers. Corporate firms charge high fees and have large advertising budgets, he said; small firms need ways to compete, whether with vanity telephone numbers like his or coordinated advertising.
"Treat it as a business," he said, otherwise focus on constitutional law or not-for-profit work.
