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That pretty much sums up what is possibly the most confusing television commercial I've seen in...well, at least a few weeks. The commercial in question is for a product called Cyalis, and in it we are presented with a montage of one-liners from a group of people that form a veritable rainbow of races, ethnicities, ages, gender, and shoe size. They all spew out some purposely confusing line about Cyalis with a figurative sly wink to the camera, as though it's all some big inside joke and we're in the know. Unfortunately, we are not. In fact, beyond the name, we don't know anything about Cyalis, other than the fact that we're supposed to ask our doctor about it.
Not once does the commercial even hint at precisely what Cyalis is; rather, it seems to derive great glee from the fact that it withholds that information from us. It's like those teaser campaigns that they come out with every few years when something huge launches. First start with short TV spots that just show a bus stop with the word "Hugo" spray-painted on it, to get everyone wondering. Then they have a commercial of a guy running through a city with a megaphone shouting "Where is Hugo? Where is Hugo?!" And after a month of everyone wondering what the hell is going on, we find out that Calvin Klein is releasing a new cologne called Hugo or something stupid like that.
Except in this case, there is no big reveal at the end. They never fess up and actually tell us what the fuck Cyalis is. And it's not like we can read between the lines, like the Viagra commercials from when it launched. They didn't actually say "this is an impotence pill" in the commericals, but anyone who was watching could figure it out. Not so with Cyalis, where we see women and men, young and old, all implying that they use the product. So while it turns out that Cyalis is another potency pill (I refused to ask my doctor, so I had to go to their website), the fact that they have eighty year old women using it would tend to raise a few alarming questions.
Which brings me to the most annoying part of the commercial, where they implore us to ask our doctor if we should use their product. This is the part that baffles me: who in their right mind would ask their doctor if they should be using a product, when they don't even know what the product is for? Are we really expected to be so worried about our well-being that we have to pre-emptively seek out treatment for something we may or may not be suffering from, without even knowing what that something is? It's one thing to say, "Doctor, I think I might have the flu - is there a flu medicine I should be taking?" It's something entirely different to say, "Doctor, I heard about this product and even though I don't know what it is or what it's for, should I be taking it anyway?" Believe me, most non-cancer patients who underwent chemotherapy because it was suggested to them by an annonymous source will tell you it's a bad idea.
For the sake of doctors everywhere, I hope we don't actually have people going out and asking them about Cyalis. Can you imagine the hell a doctor would go through if every day was just filled with people asking them if Cyalis was right for them? And since it's an impotence pill that only applies to one specific demographic (impotent men), that would mean that 95% of the people asking would not be right for Cyalis. We'd have women, children, and sexually potent men wasting not only their own time, but the time of their doctor, by asking if they should be taking a product that could have had the fucking decency to let them know what the hell it was in the first place, and save both parties the trouble.
Solutions are as follows: Either tell us what Cyalis is for in the commercial; or, if we're meant to figure it out by subtext, then give us some fucking subtext to work with. Viagra had commercials of guys getting out of bed with a satisfied grin on their face; you have old women swimming in a YMCA pool and a middle-aged guy eating ice cream. If there's some sort of tenuous link between these two images that relates to your product, I'd like to know what it is.
