Q&A: Inside the Bizarre World of Infomercials

The cheesy late-night infomercial may seem like an artifact of the '80s, and for good reason -- that's when they first became ubiquitous thanks to a bit of deregulation. But infomercials are very much still with us, and in recent weeks they've been in the headlines thanks to the astonishing popularity of the Snuggie (a.k.a. the blanket with sleeves); Cash4Gold, which became the first direct marketer to air a Super Bowl ad; and a new reality show, Pitchmen, starring Billy Mays. For some timely insights, I talked to Remy Stern, author of a new book about the infomercial industry, But Wait...There's More!

Mixed Media: We seem to be living through an infomercial moment. What's behind all this?

Remy Stern: It's really the recession. It's been great for infomercial marketers. The price of airtime has gone down and there's more airtime than ever before. Every time a big brand pulls out and there's time that needs to be filled, the infomercial guys are there to fill the void. The number of paid programs, short form and long form, has just gone up tremendously in the last few months. I hear lots of people complaining that they turn on the TV at night and all they see are infomercials, and it's true.

MM: The Snuggie has certainly been quite a phenomenon.

RS: It's been huge, and also in a weird way it's kind of tied to the times we live in -- the whole notion of this blanket that keeps you warm and comfortable. It's a great example of infomercial marketers playing into the kind of cultural moment we're having.

In the book, I quote a host at HSN who told me that sales of bedding went up after 9/11. The sense at HSN was people just wanted to have comfortable sheets and comforters to hide under as they watched the
horrible news.

MM: You say that every successful infomercial presents itself as the solution to a problem in your life. Isn't that what all advertising does?

RS: In this case it's a very concrete problem they present, and a very concrete solution. You have acne; you need to clear up your acne; here's Proactiv. You have a mess you need to clean up; here's the ShamWow.

The sort of brand advertising that Madison Avenue's famous for is very
different from the marketing that infomercials do. They need to elicit a reaction in the moment. That's what made them so savvy compared to their counterparts in the mainstream advertising world. They have the ultimate Nielsen rating, which is the phone bank. They need you to act. They want you to get up off the couch at 2:30 in the morning and run to your wallet and make the purchase.

Mixed Media: It's tempting to think that infomercials prey on the weak and stupid, the uneducated, the unemployed. But you say that's not really the case.

RS: It's a pretty broad cross-section. It would be unfair to say that it's only less-educated or stupid people who buy them. But each product is a little different and each is targeted to a different market.
Some are targeted to people who don't know any better, and then there are some that are very mainstream. A product like Proactiv is for anybody. They're just looking for people who are going to respond to celebrity endorsements. That's very different from a get-rich-quick scheme that's advertising in the middle of the night that's preying on someone who's unemployed and struggling with a pile of debt. They know perfectly well who falls for those pitches and it's not the investment banker who's watching TV at his Tribeca loft.

MM: You're a part of that broad cross-section, too, right? You were once an avid consumer of infomercial merchandise.

RS: I was, but it was in an ironic sort of way. I found these shows really amusing and entertaining when I was a teenager and still do. I was much happier watching a British pitchman in a bowtie setting a Rolls-Royce on fire than watching some sitcom. And what I found is there a lot of people like me who were buying them for the same reasons.

MM:You fell in love with infomercials back in the '80s, when there were a lot of zany pitchmen on the air. There aren't so many now, are there?

RS: It kind of petered out. For a while they were so crazy and over the top -- people like Matthew Lesko, who was running around with the question marks on his suit. There are still some colorful folks on television, but as the business grew it just became a more professional operation and big business started to get involved. Its wasn't the sort of fly-by-night operation it was in its early days, and consumers got smarter, too.

But some things endure, like the C-list pitchman. That still gets people to stop as they're flipping stations. These days it's, like, Erik Estrada pitching real estate in arkansas instead of Cher selling a hair-care formula, as was the case 15 years ago.

Mixed Media: What are the most bizarre/hilarious products you came across in your research?

RS: If I had to pick a favorite crazy product, I think it'd be a toss-up between the Flowbee, the attachment for the vacuum that lets you cut your hair, or the Aromatrim, which is this little weight-loss device you put under your nose that gives off this foul odor that kills your appetite for hours on end.

MM Gross. Did that sell a lot of units?

RS: It wasn't a big hit, but it wasn't a giant failure. You can sort of judge based on how long it's on the air. There's not really another way, because you talk to these guys and they say, "Every product I've ever introduced has been a giant hit." I had to take everything they told me with a grain of salt.

MM: What's the future for infomercials in a world of on-demand video? Doesn't their ability to attract an audience depend to some degree on there being nothing else on to watch?

RS: That's exactly what has all these guys panicked -- will people watch
infomercials five years from now if they have 100,000 hours of other programming available to them? There are a whole bunch of ways they're trying to address it, but they haven't figured it out. They've seen their hit rate go down over the last few years, until recently that trend turned around somewhat. But it's harder and harder to turn a product into a success. In the early days for every couple failures they'd have a success. Now, depending on whom you talk to, one in every 30, 40, 50 is a success. But they're incredibly inventive people. They'll figure out some way to keep making money.