From the start, Warshak tapped into the rich vein of performance anxiety that makes us willing to do—or buy—almost anything to measure up. He was hardly the first entrepreneur to strike gold there. But thanks both to luck and to his shrewd reading of the Zeitgeist, he picked the optimal moment to begin mining sexual performance for profits. When he entered the herbal-supplements business in 1999, Viagra was just a year old, but already the idea that regular men—not just porn stars—could (and should!) benefit from chemical vasodilators had become commonplace. Meanwhile, natural health was growing into a booming industry. (By one estimate, it now takes in $40 billion a year.) And it was largely unregulated.
At first Warshak’s ads followed the same crude script of his competitors. cum like a raging bull! read one for a short-lived product called Trinatin, a “powerful sexual intensifier” supposedly developed in Pamplona, Spain. The ad urged customers to “Watch your lover’s astonished look as you shoot power-packed gobs of cum up to 13 feet away!” An ad for another Enzyte precursor, this one called Biogen-14, promised you’d be “Harder Than Chinese Arithmetic—With No Side Effects!”
But by the time Warshak introduced Enzyte in 2001, he had “decided that’s not who we wanted to be.” He began investing in anything that made the product seem upscale, from those national TV ads to fancy packaging and glossy brochures. Next he invented what he called the three stages of male sexuality. Stage 1 was young men, whose libido needed no help; stage 3 was elderly men, who might have a medical issue and need a prescription. But stage 2, he liked to say, was the domain of healthy guys in their prime who could use a little boost. Men aged 30 to 50, he decided, would be Enzyte’s sweet spot.
The stage 2 concept was genius in that it let Enzyte customers tell themselves they were still plenty virile even if they secretly worried they’d lost a step. The Enzyte pitch cloaked self-consciousness in a reassuring wrapper of self-improvement—an approach that found full expression in Smilin’ Bob.
The campaign was directed by Randy Spear (yes, his real name), a former creative director at Leo Burnett in Chicago. When Spear heard what Warshak was selling, he balked. This kind of product usually was sold via DR—industry parlance for direct-response advertising (the kind of “Dial now! Operators are standing by!” dreck that runs on late-night TV). Spear didn’t do DR and told Warshak so. Warshak couldn’t have been happier. He explained that his strategy was to brand Enzyte as the reputable, mainstream herbal alternative, and that his target audience was much bigger than Viagra’s 50-plus market. It was the millions of men who fell, as he and Spear did, into stage 2.
Spear got busy imagining a campaign that would speak to men like them. The breadth of his audience—and the restrictions on what herbal supplements can claim to do—required one thing: simplicity. Then it hit him. What if Enzyte’s pitchman never said a word? What if he simply grinned, communicating with his face what Berkeley wasn’t allowed to spell out in words? What if he were not a stud or an aging sports hero (Mike Ditka would soon be pitching the erectile-dysfunction drug Levitra) but a working stiff? What if the only thing above average about this man was the size of his smile?
“Bob is honest, lighthearted, upstanding,” Spear says. “We just wanted you to see that this guy, in his world, he was doing fine.”
All eighteen ads were shot on film, not video, and Warshak bought premium airtime whenever he could. Overall, he says, he spent more than $125 million on TV ads (most of it for Enzyte). “Once we hit TV, the response was overwhelming,” Warshak tells me. He says that at its peak in 2004, Berkeley received 65,000 calls a day.
Though his recipe was “proprietary,” he acknowledges that some of Enzyte’s key ingredients—horny goatweed, ginseng, maca root, and zinc—are in similar products. “We didn’t invent anything,” he allows at one point. “We just created better marketing.”
For Spear, the first indication that Smilin’ Bob had become woven into the cultural fabric came when he saw a woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bootlegged image of Bob’s grinning face. Similarly, someone unrelated to Berkeley created the first Smilin’ Bob Facebook page. (Now there are twenty, plus a Twitter feed.) “None of us did it,” Spear says. “It had become iconic.”
