Today’s the day, when families all over the nation gather in front of the TV for the event of the year.
Of course, they first have to wade through a stupid football game.
The event of the year is the colorful panoply of new commercials made especially for the Super Bowl. Among these is sure to be an ad somewhere for a pharmaceutical whose noble goal is to help old men feel like young men.
These drugs, which treat the euphemistically named “erectile dysfunction,” have been advertised on television for a decade or so now. And one still gets creeped out when they air.
I know I do. And I’m the target audience.
Televising commercials for impotency drugs makes sense. If someone is actually listening to the commercials, chances are they are not engaged in the activity to which you refer.
No one is fooled by these commercials, so why are they sometimes so coy about their message? In ads for Cialis (a proud Hoosier product, BTW), a couple is always shown waiting until, as the ad copy puts it, “the moment is right.”
Take a moment of your own and strip that phrase down to its skivvies. What happens when “the moment is right”? And how do you as a parent explain what that means to your curious 5-year-old?
But that’s not the weird part.
In Cialis ads, the man and woman are always shown waiting for that right moment while sitting in two bathtubs.
Two bathtubs? Each commercial shows a couple older than 40, man and a woman, each sitting in a bathtub, outdoors, stark naked, waiting for that “right moment” as the sun sets romantically in the west.
I can see maybe one bathtub. After all, that is what hot tubs were invented for. A man and a woman, on the verge of you know what, sitting in a bathtub. It makes sense. It’s not something families probably want to see on TV, but it makes sense.
More sense than a man and a woman in TWO bathtubs. Outdoors. Waiting for the moment.
It might make poetic or figurative sense, but if a couple in their 50s or 60s are really waiting for the Cialis — or Viagra or Levitra or whatever — to kick in, they aren’t going to be sitting in two bathtubs, outdoors, side by side. Unless the bathtubs are next to a pickup truck on blocks.
Also, if I’m a guy depending on Cialis, when the moment is right, the last thing I want to do is hike over the side of a bathtub. More than inconvenient, it could also be dangerous. If you know what I mean.
No, if I’m waiting for the moment to be right, I’m going to be safely in a queen-sized bed somewhere, next to my significant other. Not posing for a nudist magazine in the backyard.
In the final analysis, though, one notion bothers me about the advertising of impotency remedies during the Super Bowl.
Isn’t the NFL against performance-enhancing drugs?
Contact Rodney Richey at 640-4861 or rodney.richey@heraldbulletin.com. Try not to call when he’s in the tub.
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Rodney Richey: When the moment is right
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