You may be getting calls from marketing firms, asking your opinion about Cohen the Columnist as a role model and as someone you would walk a thousand miles to have a drink with, even if he picked the drink.
I submitted the entire Hartford Business Journal subscription list as character references. I’m under consideration to replace Tiger Woods in several endorsement deals, because I’m better looking than he is and I’ve shown my moral strength by not responding to all the flirty notes I get from women readers.
The opportunity is there. While Tiger sits home (alone) and pouts, Cohen is out there on the journalistic fairway every week, generating veneration and adoration that could rub off on endorsed products.
For instance, I’m about three hours and 17 minutes away from stealing Tiger’s endorsement deal with the Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer, which has been using Tiger for about seven years and 16 minutes.
To be sure, Tiger needed an accurate watch to scurry from, well, appointment to appointment, but Cohen is a deadline fool, with the HBJ presses poised and waiting to roll, after he delivers his golden prose.
He often glares, in that sexy way he has, at his Tag watch, as the seconds tick away and the deadline looms.
Cohen often works around-the-clock to give you the very latest; he often doesn’t have time to shave. A heavy, two-day growth is no problem, though, because he whisks it away with three or four or five-bladed Gillette razors. Who better to take over Tiger’s Gillette gig than me?
The Tiger death spiral is a really good opportunity for marketing professionals to break away from that tired strategy of always looking for the very best athletes to tout the wares.
If Tiger’s 15 strokes ahead of the field and operating like some sort of birdie machine or something, guys get bored and start staring at their Tag watches.
What they want to see is Cohen, playing from the ladies’ tees, struggling for double bogies. That’s real golf. That’s the kind of spokesman who would have Nike products flying off the shelves.
Tiger doesn’t need Nike clothes or Nike clubs or Nike golf balls; he could shoot birdie golf, naked, using hockey sticks. If Cohen makes a par, wearing a Nike logo, consumers would recognize the miracle and attribute it to the logo.
Beyond all that, the Tiger magic didn’t always work. He was a big celebrity marketing tool for Buick, but he couldn’t save the Park Avenue. I still drive a Buick Park Avenue and I attract plenty of hot girls because of it.
You don’t have to be Tiger to make stuff happen. I could have saved the brand, if GM had gotten to me in time.
Since the state’s travel and tourism budget has been cut to $1 — about what I get for an HBJ column — I might volunteer to take a week off and help promote fun in a state where the liquor stores close at 8 p.m.
A few highway billboard photos of me, wearing nothing but a welcoming smile, and something about “Welcome to Connecticut,” would convince young moms to drag their families to Connecticut for the weekend.
I think there’s a future for me in all this. With U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd trailing almost every credible candidate, as well as the Abominable Snowman, in his reelection race, he’s asked me to endorse him.
That would certainly help, but even better, some of his staff has recommended replacing his photo with mine in the campaign posters and brochures.
Tiger? He’s so yesterday.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
