[1]Holt: on track for 1,000 locations by end of 2012
QualitySolicitors (QS) will this month launch the largest advertising campaign in the history of the legal profession ahead of a blitz that will see 8,000 adverts hit TV screens throughout May.
The first of the new-look ads, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, will be shown on Sunday 25 March, during the final of Dancing on Ice on ITV1, which is expected to be the most watched TV programme so far this year. The animated ‘Miss QS’, voiced by Amanda Holden, has been ditched.
The 90-second advert – the same length as John Lewis’s iconic Christmas advert – is entitled ‘For whatever life brings’.
Chief executive Craig Holt told Legal Futuresthat this was a teaser ahead of the full campaign starting in May, when the company has 8,000 adverts booked and paid for on
“mainly terrestrial channels”, such as the various ITV channels. It will then go on a cycle of “a lull” for two or three months before another blitz. In all QS is to spend £15m on advertising over 12 months.
The new advert will be accompanied by a revamped website – including 300 video testimonials from clients – an online marketing strategy, and the opening of the company’s ‘conversion’ centre, which will in future deal with enquiries to QS, including from the telephones on the WH Smith stands.
QS, which was last October, has also been bulking up its administrative hub, moving to new offices in Leicester and recruiting a host of senior staff, including Claire Smith, formerly a partner at Manchester firm Pannone handling Connect2Law. She is now QS’s partner firm director.
Mr Holt said there were now around 150 firms with 350 branches in the network, and “hundreds” more in the pipeline. QS is still on track to reach the target of being in 1,000 locations by the end of 2012, he said.