Chapter 10 · The Great Differentiator
How to Find Mass Tort Clients Using Targeted Facebook Advertising
The right ads can transform fear and anger into something approximating genuine hope.— Jacob Malherbe, X Social Media
I’m aware that the term “targeted Facebook advertising” may not be a part of the daily lexicon—or even in the general wheelhouse—for many lawyers. So let me simplify what we do at X Social Media by offering a simple analogy. Finding mass tort clients is like searching for gold in a riverbank riven with both rocks and shiny twenty-four-karat gold nuggets.
Lawyers who rely on antiquated advertising strategies are essentially picking a narrow slice of the river, slouching down into the water, and trying to pan their way to the gold. Lots of sifting. Lots of backbreaking work. Few gold nuggets. Your chances of turning a profi t are, at best, uncertain and scattershot. It’s an extremely time-consuming pursuit and, more often than not, an extremely frustrating experience.
Leveraging our particular model is more akin to heading out to that same mineral-rich riverbed, only you’re using high-tech GPS, cartographic imagery, and state-of-the-art mining equipment to find the gold. The process is easy, methodical, strategic, and swift. And the returns, if leveraged at the right time with the right support, can be highly efficient and extremely lucrative.
In our system, the vast resource-rich river is Facebook. The gold nuggets are, of course, qualifying mass tort clients. And the litany of rocks and pebbles surrounding those nuggets are the millions of Facebook users who don’t qualify for the particular mass tort docket you’re trying to fill. Knowing how to use digital tools to separate out all that gold from all those rocks is what we do best.
If you have the technological know-how, it’s a little like mining for gold in San Francisco or the Klondike before the official start of the Great American Gold Rush in the nineteenth century. The gold is sitting right there, just waiting for you to find it. Your clients are waiting patiently, their eyes glued to their phones and Facebook feeds, waiting for someone to contact them and invite them to join a mass tort.
Your potential new clients (PNCs) are, unquestionably, using social media platforms, but most lawyers don’t have the faintest clue as to how to sift through all that water and soil to find them. But we do, as evidenced by the $50 million in ad spend that we leverage and allocate every year.
As noted in the previous chapter, our process begins by establishing outside landing pages, complete with short questionnaires that help determine if a PNC qualifies for a particular mass tort. We then slip targeted ads into the feeds of Facebook users, which encourages them to learn more about the mass tort in question and sign up with your firm as clients.
We were light-years ahead of our competitors when we first deployed this Facebook-based model in 2015, and I’m proud to say we’ve only widened that gap by improving and streamlining our process since then. In doing so, we’ve helped quell the single greatest fear hanging over the mass tort industry: How, as a lawyer, do I quickly and efficiently find worthwhile clients?
If you’re currently in the industry, we can vastly speed up your discovery rate, while driving down costs. If you’re a lawyer entering our space from a different area of the law—whether it’s personal injury, family law, or criminal law—we can provide you a map and all the support you need. Here’s a breakdown of exactly how—and why—we do it.
The Power of Facebook Facebook is watching you. It’s watching me. It’s watching your clients. And it’s watching every single person, across the globe, who has signed up to use its platform and become a member of its community.
That being said, Facebook’s “free” service comes with a rather substantial set of hidden costs. Every move you make—digitally speaking—is being monitored, tagged, curated, and stored in Facebook’s vast library of data. Facebook knows which online sites you shop at, where you live, your interests and behaviors, as well as which links you tend to click. It knows the videos you watch and how long you’ve watched them. It records which posts you’ve liked or disliked, commented on, or scrolled past. As well as every image, video, and individual piece of content you’ve ever posted to your feed.
As I tell all of my clients, Facebook’s sophisticated algorithms are designed to know more about you and your interests than your own spouse. It then harnesses that data to send you ads based on your individual behaviors and preferences.
Once Facebook is embedded in your phone or computer, it starts generating an increasingly sophisticated profile of who you are, where you go, what you enjoy, and how you spend your time. All of these breadcrumbs are then dropped into something we call data buckets.
Facebook generates millions of different data buckets. Obsessed with the NFL? Into the NFL data bucket you go. Been on the hunt for some holiday-themed cookie cutters? Probably interested in baking. You’re dropped into the baking bucket. Watching an endless loop of documentaries about outer space? You’re in the space junkie bucket.
If those are the most obvious primary buckets, think of the plethora of auxiliary data buckets that Facebook can also drop you into. If you’re interested in the NFL, you’re likely interested in sports, a particular NFL team, individual players, fantasy football, perhaps sports gambling, and on and on. Facebook keeps computing away, weaving together a vast interconnected web of assumptions about you based on your online habits.
Facebook records all of this information—via thousands upon thousands of curated data buckets—so it can create and continually update a customized feed just for you. The more relevant your feed, the more likely you’ll remain glued to the platform, thumbing through, scrolling across, and clicking on Facebook ads.
At X Social Media, we simply tap into this extraordinary content bank to create ads that will appeal to users who might qualify for the mass torts our legal clients are pursuing.
Finding the Perfect Audience We are able to find individual “gold-nugget” mass tort clients thanks to a tool Facebook calls its Pixel, which is nothing more than a string of JavaScript code that monitors who is visiting a given website.
Think of the Pixel as Facebook’s master informant. Website operators use it to leverage Facebook’s incredible artificial intelligence. If you attach a Facebook Pixel to your website, Facebook will generate huge swaths of data, everything from the specific users who clicked on a particular product to who has read a particular news story.
At X Social Media, we attach Facebook Pixels to the landing pages we create because we want access to those insights as well. We want to know how many PNCs not only clicked on our ads but also what percentage of them filled out forms and became clients.
Whenever we launch a new mass tort advertising campaign, we start with what we refer to as cold traffic. We don’t know, with absolute specificity, which groups within Facebook will yield the most clients. The best we can do is cast a wide net and see what it hits.
Think of the Pixel as Facebook’s master informant.
Website operators use it to leverage Facebook’s incredible artificial intelligence.
If we return to the Zantac case as an example, we might begin by searching in the most obvious data buckets. Perhaps the data buckets labeled “Zantac users,” “heartburn sufferers” and “cancer victims.”
Once we show this ad to people who’ve been dropped into these primary data buckets, we can begin targeting a more refined audience. We can see who’s clicking on our ads. Who is watching our videos for a few seconds and who watched them from start to finish. As well as who went one step further, clicked on our “learn more” button, and filled out a form on our landing page.
This is critical data because it excites the Facebook Pixel. It’s like handing our informant top-secret information. He needs to share it, so he immediately communicates it to an ad-generating algorithm within Facebook.
By this time, the Pixel is practically screaming at the Facebook algorithm, “Look at what I discovered! These are the people you need to show X Social Media’s ad to because they’re going to click on it!”
These findings make the Facebook algorithm work even more efficiently. It can now lock onto different audience profiles and immediately show our ads to those specific groups.
At X Social Media, we refer to this as microtargeting, which is a fancy way of saying we can send ads to people who are most likely to qualify for a given tort.
What we’re trying to do is isolate the most valuable PNCs available. Let’s say one group (PNC Group A) tends to click on our ad, go to our landing page, successfully fill out our form, and sign on to become a client. These are the shiniest gold nuggets.
Then we find there’s a second group (PNC Group B), which tends to click on our ads and starts filling out forms but never finishes. They are less likely to generate hits than Group A, but we still want to keep them in the fold.
Then there’s PNC Group C, which is as useless as spam. They never click on our ads at all. Simply put, they’re not worth the time nor a single penny of our clients’ advertising dollars.
Now, we’ve given the Facebook ad algorithm a clear mission and directive. Go after Group A first and Group B as a backup, but avoid Group C.
By feeding the Facebook ad algorithm these findings, we can dramatically reduce cost-per-client rates for law firms. Using this system, we’re not limited by region or primary data buckets. We can tell the Facebook Pixel to go do its thing—nationwide—and gather up new clients from coast to coast.
It’s also why we strongly recommend our law firm clients partner with trusted call and intake centers because the faster those centers can verify that PNC Group A hasn’t been lying and are ideal clients (or that PNC Group C is being disqualified), the quicker we can make our own adjustments.
Now, we’ve done something unique. We’ve transitioned from sifting through cold traffic to isolating genuinely warm traffic. We no longer simply possess data; we have curated the data, which creates an efficient and powerful feedback loop.
In this way, it’s not dissimilar to the legal profession itself. If you’re a young trial lawyer who’s trying your first case, you’re unlikely to hit the ball out of the park the first time around. But the more experience and exposure you gain, the better you become at your job. That’s definitely been the case within X Social Media.
The more we’ve learned, the more efficient we’ve become, which has helped mass tort lawyers quickly assemble an extraordinary stable of strong clients.
Crafting Sticky and Emotionally Resonant Ads Not all Facebook ads are created equal. The more relevant and timely an ad feels to a PNC, the more likely they are to click on it.
I’ve said and written about this concept before, but it bears repeating. An ad that feels as if it’s been created just for you—one that syncs up with what you’re feeling in a given moment—is an extraordinarily powerful thing.
Imagine, as we return to our Zantac mass tort case study, that you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, and you’ve been taking heartburn medication for years. Inevitably, you have questions you want answered.
Did the Zantac cause my illness? What is my future, both financially and physically, going to look like? How am I going to be able to take care of and provide for my spouse and children?
You’re overwhelmed with doubts, anger, and worry. Ultimately, it’s those gnawing uncertainties that trouble you more than anything else. You’re obsessed with absorbing more knowledge and learning more about the potential links between Zantac and cancer.
And then, out of the blue, you come upon an ad or a video in your Facebook feed that addresses those exact questions. Maybe it’s a simple image of a Zantac pill bottle. Maybe it’s an image of a husband and wife, holding hands, as they stare at a room filled with IVs and chemo drips. Maybe it’s just a photo of someone who has lost their hair due to chemotherapy. Maybe it’s a still shot of a cancer doctor staring back at you through the screen.
How can you not click on that ad and see what’s on the other side?
We devote a great deal of thought to crafting ads that meet people where they are in the overall cycle of grief. Some of our ads operate as warnings and red flags. (You might not know that Zantac can cause cancer, but you should.) And others seek to soothe with comforting words and text. (Legal help is available if you need it.)
When a PNC clicks on one of our videos, it will lay out, in a very straightforward and honest manner, the scientific evidence linking Zantac to certain cancers.
The vast majority of our ads include some kind of text—whether it’s a “learn more” tab or “time is limited” button if a deadline is fast approaching. We do this because we know that PNCs are likely to find themselves in different phases of the grieving process.
After confusion, comes anger. After anger, worry returns, often regarding how they might pay for their treatments or take care of their family. What they do know, if we’ve done our job, is that science has shown some type of link between a product they’ve used and the cancer they’ve developed.
They feel as if someone actually cared about them enough to reach out to them. And in truth, the mass tort lawyers I partner with do care. They care about injustice and corporate negligence and the burdens that come with financial pain and physical suffering. And if we can do our job and find victims and introduce them to these law firms, they find themselves with an advocate. Which is what all of us need during times of duress.
Our Four Primary Facebook Targeting Strategies To show you how our Facebook advertising model works in practice, let’s analyze four distinct targeting strategies, as well as the specific mass torts dockets, we used these techniques to fill. Geo-Targeting: Fire Foam Just as in the real estate market, sometimes finding mass tort clients is all about location, location, location. A process called geo-targeting allows us to zero in on Facebook users in predefined geographical areas. We can send ads to audiences across the United States or simply narrow our search down to particular states, cities, or individual targeted locations within a city.
Personal injury lawyers use geo-targeting all the time, often by pinging Facebook users who are within a one-mile radius of a hospital or medical center. As a victim is sitting in a waiting room or hospital bed, paging through their feed, they “magically” find an ad from a personal injury lawyer saying that they deserve compensation for their injuries, so they quickly sign on the dotted line.
Now, consider the value of leveraging geo-targeting for a mass tort like the one involving Fire Foam, a fire-extinguishing agent used on military bases and during training exercises for firefighters. When you look at the chemical composition of Fire Foam, which is a forever chemical manufactured and sold by Dupont and 3M, you find that it’s made from a potentially harmful compound known as C8, which may cause certain signature cancers.
When firefighters or military personnel run fire drills using this foam, runoff can seep down the drain and potentially contaminate local groundwater. This can prove to be a deadly and invisible killer, not only for those conducting their training but also unsuspecting locals sitting at home using local water as well.
Thus, a forever chemical becomes a forever problem. By using geotargeting, we can send targeted ads describing the potential ties between Fire Foam and cancer to people who are working within these facilities as well as anyone within a five- to ten-mile radius of the facility.
Consider, for a moment, the power of these ads, as no one within these communities would’ve had any clue that their cancer might have been caused by a fire-extinguishing agent seeping into the ground. Our ads not only inform them of these hidden connections but help mass trial lawyers find enough clients to spearhead a mass tort.
We also employed geo-targeting to find victims injured during the tragic Las Vegas shooting incident in 2017. How do you notify individuals, from all over the globe, who may have attended that fateful Route 91 Harvest Music Festival? You use geo-targeting—as well as a proprietary tool, the Time Machine, which we will discuss in great detail in the conclusion to this book—to find them. In the end, five thousand worthy claimants were awarded $800 million in a settlement in 2019. Demographic Targeting: Boy Scouts of America Facebook allows us to search for a wide array of demographic information by applying search tags for everything from political affiliation and occupation to education levels and relationship status. In the past, I’ve written about how demographic searches have been useful in finding NFL clients for concussion cases as well as certain corporate cases, like the 2015 Halliburton overtime settlement, by directly targeting Halliburton employees.
The majority of our demographic searches focus on targeting PNCs based on their gender or age group. This can be a more complex pursuit than it first appears, as evidenced by the Boy Scouts of America mass tort, a multilayered and tragic affair involving sexual assault, bankruptcy issues, and a rather unique timeline.
Although our clients encouraged us to look for anyone, of any age, who might have been sexually abused while a scout, we also learned that there was a twenty-year period between 1963 and1983 when the Boy Scouts of America took out additional insurance for any incident that took place within their organization.
This proved to be critical information, given that the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy in 2020. Although the Scouts sought to use Chapter 11 to create a trust for these victims, we realized we could seek additional damages for victims from the insurance company that wrote up that comprehensive policy.
How could we find men who had been abused during those two decades? We did some estimating. Combing through the data, we found that the vast majority of boys who are in the Boy Scouts are between six and fourteen years of age. And most often, victims of sexual assault tend to be on the younger side of that scale, say between six and twelve years of age. We then combined this demographic targeting with geotargeting, given that laws in certain states ensured greater payouts for these insurance-based claims, and found real success.
These “open states” are locations where the statutes of limitation for sexual abuse of minors had been removed, thus allowing people in their fifties or sixties to go back and file suits for what happened to them decades ago.
To the surprise of many, we not only found an initial wave of clients but our work motivated a tsunami of additional victims to come forward. The results were staggering. On a daily basis, hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad spends were performed, leading up to the November 2020 deadline for the mass tort.
Thanks to this very targeted demographic approach—and the courage these victims showed in coming forward—a large swath of additional victims felt emboldened to do the same. The ads and discussions we helped generate unearthed a problem that was far more pervasive than many people initially realized.
The ads and discussions we helped generate unearthed a problem that was far more pervasive than many people initially realized.
Interest/Behavior Targeting: Roundup As the name implies, “interest targeting” is used to find clusters of people who share similar interests. The Roundup mass tort is a classic illustration of the power of using finely calibrated interest targeting.
You may recall that one of the key herbicides used in Roundup is strikingly similar to the firebombing chemical Agent Orange, a known carcinogen. Studies have unearthed potential links between using Roundup and developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as various subsets of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, including follicular lymphoma or b-cell lymphoma.
These findings proved well suited for a Facebook campaign because Facebook had already generated data buckets for each of these cancers.
When we launched our initial advertising campaign, we didn’t have to start with a cold audience (everyone who might have developed some form of cancer). We could start with a relatively hot one (anyone who had developed the exact cancers required to qualify for the tort).
In addition, we could also target specific occupations, including people who worked in nurseries, farms, and lawn-care businesses, right off the bat. Then, we could drill down and look at very specific behaviors associated with those particular cancers.
We learned the power of this “behavioral analysis” while working on a mass tort involving the diabetes drug Invokana. The stories we heard were devastating, including the fact that many victims were forced to undergo amputation surgeries. When we dug deeper, we realized that amputees tended to buy their clothes from a specific set of clothing retailers as well as use wheelchair ramps. This wasn’t just a few data points in a vast Jackson Pollock splotch of data; it was curated data that we could use by looking at the data buckets for these specific retailers and sending ads to people who visited those sites.
In much the same way, someone who suffers from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is bound to be interested in different things than someone who suffers from breast cancer or testicular cancer.
This curated data saved our law firm clients an extraordinary amount of time and money. To date, we have found fifteen thousand of the roughly hundred thousand total mass tort claimants in the Roundup mass tort. Look-Alike Targeting: Talc Baby Powder Look-alike targeting is a technique that we use to zero in on a particular audience and broaden it to find additional clients. Let’s say we identify an initial audience of two thousand people. This technique allows us to go to Facebook and ask it to find a look-alike audience of two, four, or six million similar people.
We use it after we’ve performed geographic, demographic, or interest targeting and have some sense of which PNCs are successfully being converted into clients.
I tend to use the mass tort involving talc-based Johnson & Johnson baby powder as a shining example of the power of lookalike audiences.
First some background: When data revealed that some talcum powders might increase the chances of developing certain cancers, we knew, demographically speaking, where to start.
Evidence showed that members of the African-American community were far more likely to use these products than other ethnic groups. The remaining problem, of course, was finding a way to whittle down this large demographic into a group of people who were likely to qualify for the mass tort.
A key turning point came when our call center partners and we found that a disproportionate number of qualifying PNCs had two specific types of cancer: ovarian and fallopian tube cancer.
We realized our primary audience should be African-American women who had shown an interest in cancer and talcum powder. When we found that this combination delivered a noticeable uptick in qualifying clients, we simply created our own look-alike audience and told Facebook to show our ads to this group.
By June 2020, when Johnson & Johnson decided to pull their talc products off the shelves, we had already isolated a very specific group of people who were likely to qualify for the tort. That was very important because corporations are deathly afraid of a potentially harmful product tarnishing their overall brand image.
That was true for Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018, as well as Roundup. And it was true for Johnson & Johnson and its baby powder in 2020. Once the risk of developing a toxic reputation sets in, corporations want to settle quickly, which ultimately benefits both mass tort lawyers and mass tort victims.
Thus, you can see how Facebook advertising targets qualifying audiences and PNCs with more accuracy—not to mention at less expense—than other mediums ever could. And most important of all, they generate vastly more predictable outcomes.
On the humanistic side of the equation, these ads can transform fear and anger into something approximating genuine hope. I’d like to think our ads are particularly successful because I experienced a modicum of that same anger and helplessness in the wake of the BP oil spill. And I’ve worked in the mass tort space long enough to have heard scores of truly heart-wrenching stories about cancer and sexual abuse, the effect of chronic pain and personal loss, not to mention the complex constellation of worries that inevitably accompany these tragedies.
PNCs who click on our ads are given a semblance of hope—even if it’s just because someone took the time to acknowledge their pain. Impulse may guide that initial click, but the legal services provided by our legal partners are indispensable in bringing some sense of awareness and closure to their pain. Which for me is the most satisfying aspect of working in this extraordinarily worthwhile field.