Barbara Lippert's Critique: The Love Drug

If you're a fan of the super-cheesy, how-to-unstuff-a-wild-bikini genre of weight-loss "supplement" ads (before-and-after photos of unattractive fat people getting thinner, harder and tanner, the women getting bustier, the men going from huge beer bellies to six-pack abs in no time), then you'll be majorly disappointed with this new Xenadrine campaign. First of all, there's no print component to grace the pages of the National Enquirer or the Globe. Second, the two TV spots are probably the first in history to actually class up a brand by going straight past the lumpy flesh to down-and-dirty, almost-X-rated sex. Both spots illustrate taboos, but the hotter, smarter and more unexpected of them, "Out of the Closet," runs after 10 p.m. on some local stations, because it is so amazingly explicit. It opens with a full-on, er, vertical mambo, as we see an attractive young couple (he's shirtless, she's got her skirt hiked) madly going at it in a walk-in office-supply closet. They bang against metal shelves, move, grunt, smack, you name it, in a more convincingly acted and directed bit of togetherness than even the soaps show. (The director is Swedish.) The spot cuts back to show four open-mouthed colleagues gathered outside the closet door, listening to the rhythmic pounding from within. As the famous line about pornography goes, we know what this is, even if we've never shared quite the same experience. But at this point, we have no idea what the ad is selling. Has one of the E.D. medications gone ca-razy? Then one of the workers says, "Three months ago, she could have never gotten into that closet!" Take that, Jenny Craig! What could have been really unseemly is saved by that unforeseen punch line. Then we get the tagline, "Get an X-rated body," along with groovy, hallucinogenic graphics, suggesting the original Charlie's Angels crossed with Hugh Hefner in the days of leisure suits, circa 1977. The spot isn't trading on the old, earnest, fake cheese of phony claims, but rather offers this cool, postmodern take. It makes no claims at all about how you'll look in two weeks' time in a bikini, but it does offer something much larger—a brand promise: You'll feel hotter and get more sex. And you can see how sophisticates who would dismiss the before-and-after pics or fake testimonials as obscenely phony might, on some level, buy into this. The second spot, "The Change," is aimed at fortysomething women and sells a Xenadrine product that boosts metabolism.It relies on a joke that is not exactly new: Open on a big, airy suburban kitchen, where a would-be smooth operator in his late teens waits for his friend. As a thin, attractive woman in a tank top and jeans enters and bends over to get ice out of the freezer, he seriously checks out her rear. His doofusness rears its head as he says, "Hey, there's a party downtown." She turns and smiles, and the friend appears. "Dude, that's my mom!" the kid says, and slaps his friend over the head. The slap isn't really necessary: It's a line built for maximum impact, as it shares the same rhythms and syllables as "Dude, where's my car?" Of course, 30 years after The Graduate, the whole hitting-on-someone's-mom thing has picked up currency thanks to the American Pie series and the hit Fountains of Wayne song "Stacy's Mom" and morphed into the MILF movement. (That's not the Modern Islamic Liberation Front but rather a cluster of increasingly pornographic Web sites.) That part aside, the reality is that women in their 40s do look great, and in these days of Wife Swap and Desperate Housewives, it's nice to have a widely run spot acknowledge that. Whether it's healthy to take pills to rev up your metabolism to lose weight is another question. The higher production values confer legitimacy to the brand, and going sophisticated-naughty sure has its benefits in terms of polishing the image. But that presupposes that you have already hit rock-bottom, which, sadly, was the case for Xenadrine. The ads were low-rent, yes, but the true horror is that Xenadrine-RFA with ephedra was not only dangerous but, in the case of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, deadly. (That particular product was taken off the market, and the new supplements are all ephedra-free.) Still, there's nothing like a little beautifully directed sex to take your mind off a drug scandal. And these ads are a lot easier to take than Anna Nicole for TrimSpa. But remember the category: It has none of the restrictions of prescription drugs. It's said that the fastest way to get a bad product off the market is with good advertising. This stuff is almost genius in avoiding the obvious pitfalls and offering something fresh and clever. So with that, I feel great about saying, caveat emptor, baby.Xenadrine AgencyThe Brooklyn Brothers, New YorkCreative director, copywriterGuy Barnett Creative director, art director Callum MacgregorAgency producerOscar ThomasDirectorAnders Hallberg, Believe MediaEditorial Crew Cuts, New York

Brand Marketing

Barbara Lippert's Critique: The Love Drug

Barbara Lippert

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Barbara Lippert