2023 Silver B2B

Agency: Gasp!

Client: Addleshaw Goddard

Entry Title: Fish & Chipmunks

Executive Summary

In an industry not known for emotive or humorous marketing, and for less than the cost of an advert in the Financial Times, law firm Addleshaw Goddard ran a creative campaign that defied category conventions and smashed its lead generation and conversion targets.

Strategy

Companies seek freelance lawyers to provide additional, short-term cover for their in-house legal teams; for example, when colleagues have parental leave or extended absence. The demand for interim resourcing is growing, particularly as workforces seek more flexible working patterns. Law firm Addleshaw Goddard provides a service—AG Integrate—that places freelance lawyers within companies, but it faced challenges.

AG Integrate didn’t have sufficient freelance lawyers to satisfy growing demand. And, as one of the smallest suppliers in the market, it struggled to attract all the specialist talent it needed. It faced more than half a dozen rival suppliers—some more than five times the size. To compound matters, AG Integrate hadn’t run a marketing campaign in five years.

Talking to the target audience told the team that too few people knew of the service. With only £35k budget, Addleshaw Goddard needed to do something creative to stand out and achieve its two campaign goals:

• Attract a minimum of eight brilliant freelance lawyers to join the team—equipping AG Integrate to fuel future growth.
• Do so in a way that would also resonate with prospective clients that saw the proposition.

Creativity

Market research revealed the market was awash with soulless stock photography and identical-sounding, jargon-laden communications. It was all highly rational and highly uniform. So Addleshaw Goddard chose a more emotive path.

The firm competes by getting to know every freelancer and client it works with, in detail and in person. The team distilled this distinctive approach into a simple, human proposition: when it comes to finding your perfect match, if a legal freelancer-client relationship isn’t 100% right, it’s 100% wrong.

Ads showed pairings that were almost right, but totally wrong. Instead of showing fish & chips they showed a feast of ‘Fish & Chipmunks’, ‘Mac & Trees’, and ‘Ant & Deckchair’.

Results

For Judges eyes only

The Team

Addleshaw Goddard - Brian Macreadie, Head of Marketing

Gasp - Giles Edwards, Founder - Sophie Edwards, Head of Client Partnerships - Beth Marchant, Client Partner