Things are looking good for the Big Three. Product sales have been going up recently and show no signs of flagging.
If you guessed Ford, Chrysler, and GM, think again. I’m talking Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know about Viagra. Now, if you were one of the 100 million or so Americans watching the Super Bowl, you will have seen several ads — 11 by my count — for Levitra and Cialis, the new entrants in the race for erectile perfection.
If you didn’t know about “erectile dysfunction,” or ED, before the Super Bowl, you do now. You and the rest of the world.
God bless Mike Ditka for informing us that Levitra “improves my erection quality.”
It was reminiscent of the good ole’ days of Viagra ads, when we knew what we were getting. A trail of clothes might lead to an open bedroom door. We might see a shot of a running faucet switching to a sign on the bedroom door reading “Do not disturb–humping in progress.”
OK, I made that one up. Still, you get the point.
Now the ads are cloaked in a veil of euphemism and innuendo, as if advertisers don’t want us to know what they are up to.
Take the Levitra ad with the guy who goes outside to get the lawnmower out of the tool shed. Lo and behold, he spots a fully-inflated football! Perhaps suffering from ADD, or more likely because he is rich and retired, he completely forgets about the lawn mower, picks it up, and conveniently starts firing at a tire swing. After a few misses, he puts it through the opening again and again. Now he’s grinning. At this point his wife appears on the porch and he disappears into the house with her, leaving the shed door open, the lawn mower untouched and the ball on the ground.
It’s like a “Sesame Street” puzzle. I wonder what Levitra could be for, kids? Arthritis?
First place in the beating around the bush category has to go to Cialis, which promises the user “36 hours to choose the moment that’s right for you and your partner.”
The Super Bowl ad for Cialis showed two ambiguously middle-aged people improbably placed side by side in two bathtubs on a hill.
The man is touching the woman’s arm with, I think, one finger.
Is he putting on lotion? Is he renacting God touching Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
No, he is “turning a relaxing moment into the right moment,” in the fabulously vague wording of the ad.
The right moment to do what? Go on a nude hike? Give each other a bath? Check into the local sanitorium for sitting in a bathtub on a hill at midday?
No, he’s ready to get it on. Really ready, as in well-equipped with the latest in EQMT (Erection Quality Maintenance Technology).
Let’s just pray that he doesn’t experience coronary thrombosis during his copulation-related activities.