Dear Cialis Cowboy

Published on the old blog on 03/11/13

Certain TV ads make me smile every time I see them … like the Fancy Feast commercial where the sweet man proposes with the white fluffycat (and its sequels), or just about anything with a Budweiser Clydesdale in it. Or my all-time favorite, the long-ago Superbowl commercial about cat herders.

On the other side, though, are the ones that either annoy me to the point of changing the channel (“less is better than more” and the Geico cavemen, I’m looking at you) or just leave me staring and going, “Wait. What?”

The Cialis Cowboy falls into the latter category. He’s driving along in his Big Truck, towing his horses in a stock trailer, when the truck and trailer get stuck. So he unloads his horses, hitches them up, and uses them to pull the rig free … leaving me wondering why he’s got driving harnesses with him rather than saddles and bridles. Or, if we say he’s one of those rare pairs-driving cowboys (or maybe a charioteer or something), then why doesn’t he have a cart strapped to the top of his stock trailer? The rig isn’t big enough for the cart to be inside. Is he borrowing a friend’s cart? Is he actually headed off to a rodeo, and just happened to have a couple of harnesses along for the ride in the black hole of tack that often overtakes the back seats (and sometimes the fronts) of a horse owner’s vehicle?

And, well, what does this have to do with erectile dysfunction?

ED commercials typically baffle me, in fact. Why show a man riding a bike? Is this some metaphor for the “you never forget how to do it” thing? Because Arizona assures me that a bike ride would not be his first choice whilst in, er, the relevant physical state. And he’d pick a bike ride over a bucket of extra krispy KFC most days. Or there are the ads with two people watching a lovely sunset from separate bathtubs. Share the tub folks! 

One of my all-time favorite riding coaches was big on saying, “Make sure that what your horse learns from you is the lesson you intended to teach today.” In the same way, I think advertisers (and writers!) sometimes need to ask themselves whether they conveyed the message they were going for. Like when I’m reading a scene where the hero comes off as a total alphhole, but I suspect the author meant for him to be forceful or conflicted. Or when a joke falls flat for me because it makes the heroine seem small-minded or a little nasty.

The fix? Well, I’m a fan of critique partners and beta readers, for starters. Even if I decide to go with my original plan, it’s good to know where I might be pushing the readers’ buttons. And sometimes, I sit there, blink, and go, “Oh, hell. They’re right.”

So, to the ED folk, get yourself a cowboy, a mountain biker, or, yanno, someone who’s ever tried to fool around in a bathtub and knows that it helps to be in the same tub. And to my writer friends, when a scene doesn’t feel quite right (and sometimes even when it does), it can be useful to step back and ask yourself, “Is this telling the reader what I mean to tell them?”