Can Enzyte Make Your Penis Bigger?

As a sex advice columnist I’m furious at Enzyte for exploiting male insecurity. But as a media consultant, I can’t help but admire the company’s marketing strategy.

Their packaging?  Brilliant come-on.  They’ve made a supplement look like a drug.  Under FDA rules drug companies have to list their chemical compositions.  For example, Viagra’s got to print “Sildenafil Citrate” under its brand name, usually in parentheses. Well, Enzyte lists their chemical composition, too.  “Suffragium Asotas.”

Only problem is, there isn’t a doctor in my medical panel that’s ever heard of Suffragium.  There’s no such chemical. In fact, Suffragium is Latin for “Applause.”  Perfect, for a company trying to give us a standing ovation.

You’d think there’d be stiff penalties for mounting an ad campaign of this sort.  But Enzyte isn’t a drug so the FDA can’t touch it.

I often tell my advertising clients to zig when the competition zags.  And that’s exactly what Enzyte’s doing.  See, they’re not in sleazy tabloids.  They’re in legitimate magazines like Business Week.  They’re not on raunchy TV shows like INSERT LATEST REALITY SHOW HERE.  They’re on serious cable channels like CNBC and Court TV.

It’s pure genius.  While the rest of the male enhancement industry is spamming our email with big promises, Enzyte took Marshall McLuhan’s theory to heart:  The medium is the message. Enzyte is doing what a lot of dot.commers did in the mid-nineties:  “borrowing” legitimacy from the media.  Remember those million dollar Super Bowl ads from companies that couldn’t meet payroll?

Felt like the companies had something worth buying.  Otherwise they wouldn’t be on national TV, right?

Gotta hand it to Enzyte.  They got hard-nosed business magazines and news channels to run their preposterous ads.  How did they do it?  Economics.  When a recession walks in the door, standards fly out the window.  These ads would have never aired when the economy was good. Men have always had a preoccupation with growing a certain body part.   But it’s always been held in check by the absurdity of the proposition.  Deep down, we know we might as well try to grow our livers.

A while back a search engine reported that Enzyte was close to passing Viagra in its “most frequent” search logs. I wish every time a man used a search engine and typed “supplement” they’d get back a response that said, Did You Mean to Type “Swindle?