29-year-old Fort Worth attorney Bryan Wilson AKA “The Texas Law Hawk” is blowing up YouTube with spectacularly terrible ads full of explosions, motorcycle stunts, waving flags and of course; hawk screeches. It’s totally working too.
Yes, Wilson is a real attorney with a law degree from Texas Tech according to his local news station WFAA.
Apparently he’s received some criticism about the, uh, unprofessional vibe of these commercials but I think he’s on to something. The video above hit 345,000 views in two days and I bet that number will be way higher by the time you’re done reading this post.
If you’re in a situation where you need a lawyer and you don’t have company or family counsel on speed dial, how the heck do you pick an attorney? Bet you call someone you’ve heard of. And if you’re in the Fort Worth area, pretty soon you’ll definitely have heard of the The Texas Law Hawk.
Wilson actually started some YouTube shenanigans back in May, and you can watch an earlier commercial right here:
“Actors” are friends, and the budget is low but that doesn’t matter because these videos clinch that “so bad it’s good” while also making Wilson look kind of awesome. (A well-fitting suit works wonders.)
As you can see he’s bent the throttle on the whole yelling-and-blowing-shit-up theme, landing him on this and a bunch of other websites and doing exactly what Wilson hoped for: raised his personal brand awareness.
Supposedly it is working and Wilson’s practice has had a lot more calls lately. “The best was a call from a detective in Kentucky,” Wilson told WFAA. “His message says: ‘Brian, I just wanna tell you, you make bad-ass commercials.”’
Obviously this is a huge jump-start for his practice on name-recognition alone. Now all he’s got to do is maintain a halfway decent record in court and he should have enough cases to keep his office busy for awhile. Think he’ll get tired of people on the street asking him to make hawk-screechy noises?
Contact the author at andrew@jalopnik.com.