TORPY: MARTA bans ads for lawyers and massage parlors. What’s the rub? - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

[Bill Torpy]

Last year, MARTA “updated” its advertising policy, although comments from its board members indicated more like they were cleaning up.

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Jennifer Ide, now board chair, noted some ads on buses were “kind of tacky.”

Last year, a sales manager told the board about “the strategic importance of maintaining a consistent brand image across all MARTA-owned assets.”

“If advertisers perceive the Authority’s facilities as a medium for advertising goods and services that the average rider perceives as less desirable, then advertising rates and revenues will decline.”

The board banned ads for alcohol, massage and tattoo parlors, title pawn or pawn shops, check cashing institutions and lawyers.

I can’t say if MARTA’s “average riders” look down on the products and services above. No doubt many partake in them. The agency simply wants to offer a more chic advertising experience.




Credit: Courtesy

Credit: Courtesy

Of course, one cannot make egg foo young without cracking some eggs. In this case, the egg-break is that MARTA will lose half its advertising — a drop of about $3.5 million a year. They hope to make it up with ads from hospitals, as one board member suggested, or from nonprofits, arts groups or “neighborhood retail.”

Granted, that ad money will not be missed because MARTA’s business is booming. (OK, OK. I kid. Last year the agency carried around 65 million passengers, as ridership slowly returns after COVID-19. But they used to have 170 million riders in 2001.)

MARTA has a $1.6 billion budget, with $654 million in net operating funds and $909 million for capital programming.

Foy figures he kicks in $1 million a year into MARTA’s coffers. His ads are affixed to the fronts of more than 400 buses. One of those buses, with a Strong Arm out in front, T-boned a car with a driver who hired Foy.

“We tried the case and got a big verdict,” the lawyer told me. “We sue them all the time. It’s nothing personal.”

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He added, “I don’t know if they feel they’re getting beat up. They’re in the business of being on the road each day.”

That is, they crash.

Actually, the “nothing personal” lawsuits are an overriding reason for removing attorneys’ ads.

“I’m very excited about getting some of the plaintiffs’ attorneys who are suing us off of our assets,” said board member W. Thomas Worthy, a lawyer himself, albeit not one who’d festoon his name on a bus.




Credit: JOHN SPINK / JSPINK@AJC.COM

Credit: JOHN SPINK / JSPINK@AJC.COM

Foy does indeed seek bus business. “If you’ve been injured in a bus accident in Atlanta, contact the experienced Atlanta personal injury lawyers at John Foy & Associates,” his website reads.

He figures he’s the No. 2 advertising attorney in Georgia behind the firm Morgan & Morgan — you know, “For the People.” But he adds he’s probably MARTA’s leading advertising lawyer. Or was. (His ads remain on a lot of buses. He figures they haven’t sold new ads yet, so he’s enjoying free advertising.)

“Safe to say, attorneys are the biggest buyers of ads on MARTA,” he said.

The placards, Foy says “are like moving billboards. And Fulton and DeKalb counties are places I want to be seen.”

However, he added: “I’m not advertising to MARTA riders. I’m advertising to people in cars, who are out and about.”

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Advertising lawyers are often scorned as low-rent ambulance-chasers. But they can carve out a nice living. Atlanta, he said, has long been one of the top three markets for lawyer advertising, which was legalized in a 1977 U.S. Supreme Court case, Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. The high court ruled that John Bates, a young lawyer who placed an ad in the newspaper, was engaged in commercial speech protected under the First Amendment.

Billboard operators celebrated, and lawyers have since unabashedly plastered their names and likenesses all over.

Critics complain that if you call such a firm, you won’t get the guy on the billboard. Probably so. But, then again, if you call Alston and Bird, you’ll reach neither of them.




Credit: Bill Torpy

Credit: Bill Torpy

Foy, a Milwaukee native, has practiced in Atlanta for about 30 years. He started with Gilbert and Montlick, a firm that advertised, and then hung out his own billboard. He now has 60 lawyers and if you’ve been injured, and the other guy has good insurance, he’d like to hear from you.

The bus ads are helpful, but most business comes to Foy through internet advertising. He’s sunk tens of millions of dollars into that and his website.

As to the “Strong Arm?”

Well, catchy call words are good for the lawyers in the injury business. After the ad guy who came up with lawyer Ken Nugent’s “One Call, That’s All” parted ways with Ken, he approached Foy with the “Strong Arm” slogan.

“I told him that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Foy recalls. But he realized dumb can be brilliant and has since trademarked the phrase.

“It’s a great hook,” he says.

So, I had to ask. About the strength of the famous arm. “How much can you bench?”

Foy, a wiry fellow, demurred.

“I work out every day,” he said.