I LOVE this card.
As you might know from my historic blog posts, I’m often very critical of law firm e-cards — there are so many ways firms can get them wrong. They’re too long, too dull, too cliche’d. They’re too politically correct or self-absorbed.
First, never mix Marketing and Christmas.
Holiday cards should subtly support a firm’s brand while staying miles away from anything that stinks of mercenary Marketing.
It’s a dangerously thin line. We all hate cards that feel even the tiniest bit like “Merry Christmas! Hire Me!” (Don’t list all your practice areas, for example….) I don’t even recommend inserting a business card into a folding card.
The card from L&E powerhouse Fisher Phillips is beautifully executed.
It shows an animated red paper airplane gliding through a number of different settings, including a snowy scene, city skyline, campfire, office, and gifts. It’s clever and creative, perky and festive, and brightly illustrated without being immature. It’s appropriate for the full range of year-end holidays, and culturally sensitive without being annoyingly PC.
And the entire video is less than 30 seconds long. This is roughly the maximum length I’d recommend without a very good reason.
People are busy and have short attention spans.
Videos that run a minute or more risk being deleted before you get to the payoff at the end. Two minutes or more? Few, if any, viewers will make it that far. Unless you’re Martin Scorsese, I’d suggest shoot for one minute at the absolute maximum. If you can create and execute a holiday video for a law firm that’s good enough to hold your audience’s attention for more than a minute, you’d be working in Hollywood, not toiling in a law firm’s marketing department…. 😉
Fisher Phillips’s hook is that the paper airplane is folded from the firm’s new bright-red, 3D logo. That is, it directly leverages the firm’s new brand, but doesn’t feel like we’re being sold anything.
Well done, CMO Kevin Sullivan and Marketing Partner Jim McDonald. Click here to watch the entire card.
Full disclosure, Fishman Marketing designed Fisher Phillips’s new brand and 3D logo (you can see it executed on their website at fisherphillips.com/ or the whole brand campaign here), but we did not design the holiday card.
