Sweeping Into the U.S. Market with 100,000 CDs and an Interactive Web Site Combo

By Larry Bodine

Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt’s goal was to achieve a unique and differentiating brand position and to effectively reach U.S. law firms.   The challenge was to do it from across the border in Canada. 

The firm, with offices in Toronto, Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa, overcame all the cross-border challenges, using their 2003 NorthSouth initiative, involving a CD connected to its www.oslernorthsouth.com Web site.  Not only did the campaign deliver on all of their goals and more, but the firm won first place in a U.S.-based 2004 marketing award competition in the electronic media category.

The program has resulted in a lift in name awareness in the U.S. market, measured primarily by large quantities of direct and anecdotal feedback, Web site traffic and significant new files. “We succeeded in delivering a product that exceeded the expectations of the firm’s leaders.  At the same time, we met the key goals of the program that we had articulated at the outset,” said Nanette Matys, Osler’s Director of Client Development.

Web was center of campaign

From preliminary planning discussions to delivering the initial 35,000 CDs – costing approximately $2.30 per unit -- for distribution, the project took about four months of non-consecutive time to complete. By the end of the calendar year, the firm had distributed approximately 100,000 units using traditional methods (including insertions with selected legal publications, conference handouts and mail) to target audiences based primarily in the U.S.

With oslernorthsouth.com in place now for more than a year, the Web site was at the center of their NorthSouth campaign for 2004, which launches again in the July 2005 issue of American Lawyer magazine. And with the CD now being emulated by a few of their competitors, they’ve switched gears once again to promote their cross-border expertise and oslernorthsouth.com with a new approach.

Refreshing a well-known program

Osler has a strong culture in which innovative legal solutions to complex client problems flourish. This same culture, combined with a healthy respect for the skills and expertise their marketing professionals bring to the business, enables the firm to engage their target markets and key clients via new approaches to traditional marketing communications challenges.

The firm faced the challenge of differentiating their annual NorthSouth marketing communications program from previous successful iterations and, at the same time, of satisfying the firm’s expectations for return on investment.  In 2003 the Osler marketing team created a media-rich CD, “Bridging Cross-Border Business Law.” The CD delivered engaging, high-impact visual content and was designed to act primarily as a tool to drive traffic to the firm’s new “cross-border” Web site, www.oslernorthsouth.com. This Web site was developed and launched simultaneously with the CD, and now provides a forum for the firm to continuously showcase their expertise in cross-border law.

This approach originated from the marketing team’s view that CD technology should deliver rich media content, and that the Web should be used to deliver substantive content. The approach would also ease the problems that always arise when producing substantive legal updates in print (e.g., making them compelling and getting them into the hands of the right people in a timely way). For example, using the Web as their primary publishing platform would enable them to alert valued clients and other contacts about the availability of new updates by e-mail, and enable users to easily search and print documents of interest “on-demand.”

It also facilitated the firm’s goals for the program, which included:

1.Tracking and analyzing their effectiveness in increasing the reach and awareness of the firm in the U.S. market.

• 2.Meeting visitors’ specific topical interests.
• 3.Ultimately, bringing in new work.

Osler’s cross-border marketing efforts

Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt has always had a leading cross-border practice. Many of the firm’s initial significant clients were U.S. multinationals either operating businesses in Canada or engaged in major cross-border transactions. The firm has a continuing business orientation plus a desire to actively communicate with U.S. corporate clients and referring law firms about new and existing significant differences in the Canadian and U.S. legal environments.  This led to the creation, six years ago, of the first substantive NorthSouth publication. This was a brief but high-quality booklet distributed as an insert with the widely read July “Top 100” issue of American Lawyer magazine.

Created by Judy Stein-Korte, Osler’s Chief Client Development Officer, the program developed over the years into a highly effective and internally sought-after vehicle to demonstrate the firm’s experience in and knowledge of cross-border law.

Then, in 2002, in response to feedback from readers, Osler produced and distributed their NorthSouth publication on a CD. This groundbreaking and widely recognized “digital compendium” delivered a mini-library of substantive articles addressing an array of legal issues right to the desks of U.S. corporate counsel, senior executives and lawyers in private practice. The articles highlighted recent developments in Canadian law of interest to their valued U.S. clients and contacts, covering topics including:

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

• Changes in Canadian corporate tax rules impacting U.S. companies doing business in Canada.
• Landmark court decisions in copyright, employment law and more.

Moving traditional marketing programs to the Web

“Looking back to early 2003, I remember the challenges–of articulating an improved vision and leading the team that would deliver a second iteration of the NorthSouth CD–as my initiation to the firm. I had been very impressed with the quality and substantive content of previous issues of NorthSouth, and particularly with the 2002 CD. It was not going to be easy to differentiate their 2003 offering from the previous year’s program,” Matys said.

However, Web sites typically don’t grow new audiences without significant promotion. Because the firm had already committed to producing and distributing another CD, they evolved their focus to where the CD itself served primarily as a promotional tool, delivering a high-impact brand experience to the user through rich media.

These visually compelling and informative elements of the CD were designed to engage the viewer, encouraging further exploration of the content. Rather than providing the full length articles on the CD, they posted short introductions to the substantive content that would now reside on the Web site. The CD provided links directly to the full article on oslernorthsouth.com, thereby allowing the team to track the number and length of visits as well as other online behaviors (e.g., where else on the site visitors “traveled to”: e.g., did they move from an article to a lawyer-author’s contact information?) .

The essence of the Osler experience

Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt has a quietly powerful differentiating quality that sets them apart from other Canadian law firms delivering top tier services and competing for a share of the cross-border legal market. It is this quality that helps the firm attract and retain the most highly recommended and recognized expert lawyers, which leads them naturally to working with clients on their most significant legal matters. Time and again, clients, competitors, and Osler’s own legal professionals comment on the quality of people and the culture of excellence that strongly binds their service orientation.

To attempt to capture this, their creative team, consisting of internal and external legal, editorial, communications and technology experts, developed and subsequently rejected numerous creative concepts. Through an evolutionary process, they ultimately decided to explore the possibility of presenting short video clips featuring a selected group of their most senior partners and practice group leaders, speaking comfortably in their roles as experts about relevant and important differences in the Canadian and U.S. legal environments.

Additionally, these firm leaders talked about the client-service focus that distinguishes Osler from their competitors. With an aversion to the “talking head” approach to interviews, the creative team opted for a more spontaneous interview style, with the interviewer positioned off camera. Each interview was then tightly edited to deliver a brief, edgy, more contemporary presentation.

From the outset, the design of the CD was focused on three primary goals:

To immediately convey a sense of the firm’s unique personality and culture once recipients launched it from their computer’s CD drive.

• To deliver a compelling message about the quality of Osler’s expertise and their  leadership position in the cross-border space, via previews of the substantive content available on the new Web site.
• To engage users sufficiently to prompt them to further investigate the oslernorthsouth.com content by following the many links from the CD.

The CD-Web combo achieved all three.

Larry Bodine is the Regional Director for North America of the PM Forum, a global organization of 3,000 marketers and professionals in the law, accounting and consulting fields. He can be reached at 630.942.0977 and Lbodine@PMForumNA.org.