Presumably, the target audience are men who think they’ve got a problem and are willing to pay for a solution. Pretty basic advertising ploy, I’d say. It only has to make sense to the first customer in line, which is the company paying for the advertising. In this case, the idea is probably to associate the product with resourcefulness, which would appeal to most men.
I almost miss Enzyte Bob and his smiling wife …
Sometimes I wonder if the viagra commercials aren’t actually aimed at the women. For example, you never see an ED commercial in which a man rescues a hot 20-something woman with a flat tire. “The most interesting man in the world” has babes hanging off him left and right, but that’s just to sell beer.
No… the guys on ED commercials are hanging out at home with their wives, taking long baths or solving self-inflicted problems on the job. Isn’t this the textbook image of what a woman wants to see in an ED treatment?
“Viagra: Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.”
Presumably because you don’t have an EKG or Echo machine just laying around to check heart function and stuff. You know the small print and the hushed warnings? The part that tells you these products could dangerously lower your blood pressure? Yeah. Those.
The best part of those Viagra adds for me is the blue tint everything seems to have…which is an actual side effect of Viagra.
Hmm… Not that I noticed. I’ll try to keep a lookout for that when I see the ad again. Car ads have that little notice “Professional driver. Closed course.” when they show a car backing out of a driveway, so maybe there is a little “Don’t open a hot radiator” notice that flies across the Viagra ad.
I haven’t seen the ads, but it sounds to me that these guys problem is not hardness, it’s just that they don’t know how to operate anything, or how to put it in the right place.
Viagra doesn’t help if you aim for the bellybutton.
OK, I can’t let this mean spirited ignorance go on. This is getting out of hand (so to speak…)
My manly 4 wheel drive pickup started overheating while I was up near Flagstaff (a Rugged Man town, with gorgeous western mountain scenery and a name that fits in with discussion of erections…). The truck had developed a leak in the water pump, where it attached to the block. I was about 20 miles out from Flag, so I was on my own. I was prepared with a full kit, so I grabbed my tool (stop snickering!) and was able to tighten the bolts and stop the leaking, but the radiator was short of water. What could I do? I had a cooler, so I melted ice into the radiator, to get the level up enough so I could drive back into town and buy some new anti-freeze. I was neither enveloped in a cloud of superheated steam, nor suffered severe burns. As a matter of fact, NOTHING bad happened.
The truck ran for years after that without any problems. I didn’t ruin the radiator, nor crack the block.
Definitely laughed aloud at this one!
it the time it took for you to get your hands on your hard tool the cooling system had relaxed and lost pressure (or no longer had it due to the expulsion of fluids). the amount you added may have been warmed by the hot radiator and the block may have cooled so that it didn’t crack the block.
problems do occur many times for others. that why the cautions and the pills.
a real man would have used one of his beers on the tv commercial.
They are probably doing just as well at problem-solving and decision-making as most men with full raging boners.
That makes sense to me. A guy who’s having a hard time getting it up might be worried that it means that the spark has left his relationship, or that he and his wife just don’t have “chemistry” any more, or something like that. The ad is meant to reassure them: No, your relationship is just fine, you still love each other, you just have a simple medical problem that has a simple solution.
As for the weird and indirect commercials, that’s a result of the laws concerning advertisement of pharmaceuticals. If your ad tells the benefits of a drug, then it also has to list the side effects and counterindications. Which at worst might scare off your customers, and even at best is probably boring. So you have a choice of showing an ad that’s simple and direct, but has all of that scary and boring stuff in it, or showing an ad that doesn’t actually say anything, but doesn’t have to have it. Yes, sometimes the ad agency will go for the full-disclosure route and try to make it interesting, but not always.
What the hell is up with that?
As someone else suggested, perhaps it appeals to women.
Better maybe, since they aren’t as, you know . . . distracted.
Enzyte Bob is doing well indeed. And has a very happy misses at home.
A few years back there was a third penis pill whose name escapes me now, with an ad campaign about “getting back in the game” and showing a guy throwing a football through a tire swing. Way too subtle for me, apparently… I thought it was a drug for muscle pain like Celebrex.
+1
A classic line,sir.
May I borrow it?
The Cialis commercials also get me. They show a series of apparently happy middle-aged couples whose relationship is apparently hinged upon the availability of a drug which prevents ED. A real life commercial would show two frustrated people in a bed trying not to look at one another.
Also, I notice that ALL ED commercials only show male-female couples. Not that I have done anything other than wonder about it, but I have to imagine that many middle-aged gay couples would also have a need for one partner or the other (or worse BOTH) to use the product.
I sit there howling with laughter over all the little romantic touches. Slow dancing. Sharing. Caring. Flirting! Strolling hand in hand on the beach. Nuzzling, head on shoulder, twirling of hair. Like it’s assuring the women, oh, he will turn into a stallion, yes, but he will act like a guy in the most cliched personal ad ever written in the 70’s.
Just had a thought for a new ad campaign – Viagra as a diagnostic test for relationships.
“Maybe it IS her. Find out for sure by taking our little blue pill. If you still can’t get an erection, maybe it’s time to trade up.”