• by Les Luchter , Yesterday

Rugiet, a telehealth provider of men’s sexual health products, piles on the puns and innuendo in a new campaign for its ED treatment.

In a :30 spot running on broadcast and streaming, it’s halftime for a hapless football team, but the coach urges on a “Second Half Rally.” 

“I’m going to give it to you straight, guys,” he tells the players. “You were soft out there.” He then explains how Rugiet’s ED meds “are designed to work on your body andyour mind….If you want to be a champion, you need both.””

In a two-minute version found on YouTube, the coach first addresses one of his “soft” players, named Johnson. He then continues, “You're either going to lay down or you're going to stand up,” as a player named Wood rises. Finally, he declares, “I want you to get out there and I want you to just play hard” to an excited group of motivated men.

What makes Rugitet’s ED meds different? According to the coach, they “boost blood flow below your line of scrimmage, and…support these arousal signals in my brain.”

Without the comedy, Rougiet’s flagship ED brand, Ready, is a mint-flavored sublingual (dissolved under the tongue) that combines tadalafil (generic Cialis), sildenafil (generic Viagra) and apomorphine, a drug which is officially FDA-approved only to treat motor fluctuations associated with advanced Parkinson's disease.

“It has been approved in Europe and other areas of the world” to treat ED, “with really good success and a lot of data to support its use, as long as it’s given sublingually,” Rugiet co-founder and chief medical officer Vipul Khanpara told Marketing Dailyearlier this year.

Representing a decided shift for five-year-old Rugiet, which only recently was running a more straightforward commercial, the new campaign marks the debut work of an in-house team put together by Andrew Fatato, Rugiet’s new vice president of brand and creative. Fatato had formerly been creative partner at the Brooklyn-based Major agency, whose quirky work included the product launch of Drugs for Plants.

“Rugiet feels its meds aren't like anything else on the market, and so its advertising shouldn't be, either,” Fatato explains to Marketing Daily. “The goal is to connect with guys and speak to them how they want to be spoken to.”

Campaign success will be measured through such metrics as direct site traffic and organic search volume, he says. The target audience is 30- to 55-year-old men.