On January 20, 2009, a friend and I drove down from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. At the time, I personally had nothing to do with the government.
But my friend had been involved with the Obama campaign from its unlikely beginnings. Thanks to him, we were now going to D.C. to watch Obama’s inauguration from a very special place.
D.C. was a madhouse that day. The streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of people.
My friend and I managed to park. We started making our way towards the National Mall. Barricades had been erected to corral and direct the masses so they could pile up in front of the Capitol building. Fortunately, this did not apply to my friend and me.
I’ll wrap up my experience from that day in a second. But first let me tell you why I bring this up.
I got an email today from a reader named Jon. Jon is a copywriter. One of his clients is an organization filled with high-status, high-authority persons.
But for reasons I cannot divulge (because I don’t know them), these powerful and authoritative persons must remain anonymous. Even their direct contacts must remain anonymous.
So Jon wrote in, and using his best Ali G voice, he asked me how to “big up an authority figure if that figure needs to stay anonymous?”
So here’s one thing I told Jon — maybe it will be relevant to you too:
If you want authority, but you got nothing else to work with, you can name tangential contacts.
Trump. Putin. Gary Bencivenga. Whoever the biggest person is that you can get.
It doesn’t have to be particularly meaningful connection — the name is more important than a really close tie. If you ever met once, even for a few seconds… if you ever attended the same event… or hell, even if you were ever in the same town at one point.
So I guess you see where I’m going with this.
Back on that 2009 Inauguration Day, my friend and I got carried around in the sea of people. We soon realized we wouldn’t see a damn thing if we pushed our way into the crowds in front of the Capitol. So we turned around, and by a circuitous route, we made it to the Washington Monument.
There were a bunch of people there also. They were looking at large-screen TVs showing the inauguration. I jumped up in place, and for a moment I could see the Capitol building above the crowd. I must have seen Obama, somewhere up there, for a split second. I guess.
And I guess you might have had enough of me and of this email by now. But hang on.
Because there are a few caveats about this authority by association stuff. Here’s how to actually make it useful:
1. Don’t make it absurd. The association doesn’t have to be super tight or flattering. But it has to be a little tighter and a little more flattering than my connection to Obama.
2. Don’t telegraph what you’re doing. For example, don’t make your loose association in an email where you explain that very technique.
3. Don’t bring up people your market doesn’t care about. Like Obama. He’s pretty irrelevant today to the space of direct response marketers and copywriters.
So is that the best I got? Obama, maybe, 12 years ago? Don’t I have even a tangential association to anybody more interesting in the direct response space?
Maybe I don’t. Or maybe I just choose to big up my authority in a different way. In the poorly chosen words of my friend, Barack Obama, while he was trying to make the case for government-run healthcare:
“UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”
If that makes little sense to you, perhaps you’d like to join my email list. I don’t promise it will answer this particular riddle… but there are many secrets and mysteries inside you might like. Click here if you want in.