Andrew Tindall judges that Legora and Harvey’s celebrity-led legal AI campaigns are already showing signs of sameness. They need to differentiate and build a brand immediately. Here’s how.
Legal AI has finally reached the only logical endpoint for a category built on machine intelligence: hiring attractive men in expensive suits.
Neither campaign is trying very hard to explain what makes its AI meaningfully different. There may well be some brilliant, very technical and subtle product differences under the bonnet, but that is not what these campaigns are leading with. They are leading with memory, feeling, fame and a pair of sharp human jawlines.
AI’s wonder phase is going limp and waving in phase two, technologically democratised sameness. And once a category looks the same, marketing must step in.
This is not the first sign. Cast your mind back to ChatGPT’s first big brand campaign. OpenAI hired a bunch of humans to shoot on 35mm film and told stories about people cooking, exercising, traveling and using ChatGPT in little daily moments. No rational persuasion of feature superiority or breathless explanation of why this model is 14% better at pretending to be an intern. It was an emotion-first campaign designed to make you feel something for the brand.
Claude’s Super Bowl spot reached for something similar from the opposite angle. No promise of faster tech, more plugins or processing power. Instead, Anthropic clung to one of the few rational differentiators left in AI, how the platform charges for its use. It promised to remain ad-free while delivering a funny, emotional set of ads designed to make us feel that Claude is less creepy and robotic. And less likely to slip a sponsored mattress recommendation into your divorce paperwork.
The companies with the most famous products in AI have decided that the product is not enough. They must build brands through broad reach, emotional advertising and trust. If you’re a marketer, you should feel a stirring within you right now. Not a mattress-related stirring. A more professional, marketing one.
These legal AI campaigns demonstrate that all categories globally will reach this strategic conclusion. Saying “AI for lawyers” already tells most buyers the rough shape of the promise. Faster research, drafting and reviews, with fewer miserable nights with red tracked changes. We get it.
The machines will generate content at a speed never seen before. They will connect datasets we previously had sitting around in old Excel spreadsheets, turning digital landfills into gold. Sure, they will make mistakes, we will have to check the stuff, but they will be efficient enough that any business not using some version of this will look like it’s still faxing contracts to a Hotmail address. Eventually being left behind in the three-martini-lunch history books.
Freshfields, one of the most respected law firms globally, has just announced a partnership with Anthropic to jointly develop legal AI tools. Reuters says the work includes legal and market research, contract review, document drafting and internal workflow automation. This list will sound familiar to Legora and Harvey. Even if they do manage to invest and do this stuff better than white-labeled tools, most buyers cannot see, remember or value those differences clearly enough to create any sense of differentiation.
This industry-agnostic revelation will come for us all. B2B SaaS has relied on switching costs to hold clients, AI has done away with them. Lawyers and creative agencies have billed per hour for stuff AI can supposedly do in seconds, so will eventually have to switch to selling outcomes not time. Everyone will need this tech to have a seat at the table, and it will all largely do the same thing.
Businesses won’t win by having more AI, but by having more brand. Being the brand that comes to mind first, that feels obvious, familiar and less risky. The brand that feels good and feels like the right choice without you really knowing why.
This is why I’m weirdly optimistic today. AI has had a pretty depressing impact on a lot of industries so far. Yes, there are more tools and wonderful things we can do. But the impact on expectations and job cuts has been brutal. The next phase of AI will ensure skilled, trained marketers who understand how to build brand equity are back in rude demand. And perhaps even skilled, trained lawyers who can make the most of this new tech will remain needed as well. Heck, once the tools are all the same, a business’s growth will depend on which humans work there across all departments.
Which brings me back to Legora and Harvey. Both marketing teams have decided to hit the seductive celebrity button. In my The Creative Dividend research with System1 and Effie (check out page 39), we found that celebrity is one of the worst distinctive brand assets for creating highly distinctive advertising, the first step in brand building.
Yes, campaigns with celebrities see roughly double the chance of fame, which means people talking about your brand, as everyone has been doing with Legora this week. But these campaigns generally see less profit and market share because too few brands work with celebrities long enough for them to wear in, get properly linked to the brand and start paying back the extortionate fees.
The outlier campaigns do the boringly effective thing of sticking with the celebrity for three years or more until the famous person stops being a famous person standing near the brand and starts becoming part of the brand’s memory structures. So, I’m hoping both teams signed big and long deals. And other brands consider this when faced with this inevitable challenge.
And this is inevitable. I’m bored of hearing how AI will change industries. It already has. Now comes the very hard bit. Scaling a maturing category through marketing. AI was supposed to make marketing less human. But I reckon it will force the return of proper brand building.
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