Infomercials.. Enough Already

Ok.. so I used to be an online gamer and stay up all night every night.. well Fox used to have a 1980 to mid 1990 movie on around 5 am..

I turn on Fox..
"The flava wave deluxe cooks at..."
Wtf is this? Another damn Infomercial..

It really shocks me people are dumb enough to believe that these products are "top of the line" but yet they can afford to sell them for "so cheap".

I seriously have no idea how these guys make any money what so ever..
Advertising (Commercial costs)
Creating The Product
The Guests (Actors) They Hire To Give "Great Testimonials"

Then they ship out some product supposably worth hundreds of dollars for $19.99 or sometimes 3 payments of $19.99
BUT WAIT.. if you act now, we'll take off one payment..
or..
WAIT.. there's more.. we'll send you more useless crap.

How can these guys afford to keep going? I know that the products they make honestly aren't worth two cents but if you figure how much they're charging compared to how much all that they're doing to get there product out there costs.. you have to imagine that the net income isn't too great :| and i'm sure getting a commercial on Fox can cost a pretty penny.

So there's my rant for the day as I turned on Fox hoping to see a nice movie and instead i'm listening to some guy flap his gums about some oven that cooks a turkey in 15 minutes.

That market is tired and failing in my opinion.

We are in the right place as examples such as the writers strike show that advertising is huge bucks online, and all the networks taking their media and letting viewers choose when they want to watch it.

Ideally I want be right in the middle of all of that, innovative video advertising by 2010.

Do these people with the Fox Commercials make anything at all? The only people who will catch it is the night owl gamers and the people getting up to go to work, and most likely all they'll do is either turn the channel or ignore it like I do.

It's got to be doing something though if they can afford to keep putting their commercial back on.

I actually watch the shit sometimes and study it so I can eventually outdo them on every possible front. Not only sandbag their entire market, but make an ad much more compelling and marketable.

They always have the most pointless bullshit, maybe it's been proven to work, but after seeing the same thing over and over and over you'd think something new would turn up.

I just think it's funny people honestly think something being sold for that cheap is "top of the line".

I bet you when you buy the product, it breaks down, it requires 10 kind of batteries you've never heard of and a bunch of other different crap you don't have just to run it.. and in the end it doesn't work nearly as well it says it does.

I can't speak for a number of these products, but I own a Magic
Bullet and it's everything they advertise it to be, and I could not
be happier with it as I make a lot of smoothies all the time.

It works out great and I've used it for other things as well
to make things for dinner, desserts, and cocktails. The infomercial
ads are great for seeing real, live ad-copy in action - and the
numbers these successful ads pull is truly amazing.

Zeprokon

Zeprokon said:

I can't speak for a number of these products, but I own a Magic
Bullet and it's everything they advertise it to be, and I could not
be happier with it as I make a lot of smoothies all the time.

Click to expand...

HaHa, everyone I know falls victim to the Magic Bullet infomericial...

Infomercials make interesting study. The successful ones are worth market research and worth investigating their presentation style. They get really annoying after seeing them once.

TV advertising is on the way out anyway. Only 18% of TV Ad campaigns are effective.

A good infomerical on a shopping network will cost you $10K USD.

If you have the right product, you will do $100K per session minimum.

Remember the "Vegamatic" guy?

I heard not to long ago that these long infomercials way over exceed profits made by conventional commercials. Also like Uptownbuler said HSN actually has to approve the products being sold. You have to pay them to sell your product, and they get a percentage of your profits.

Even though this is a somewhat dying way to advertise, there is allot to be learner from watching these. It is like door to door salesmen. There will always be a place for them in the world. Bottom line in the technique works.

As a part time insomniac, I love infomercials for kitchen gadgets. They keep me entertained with their fake facial expressions at 4am. "Mmmm, that's JUICY!"

But how do they make any money at all?
Think about it.. they have to make the product, ship it, advertise it.. and then they sell it for REALLY cheap?

So, either they're making the products with some of the cheapest resources on the planet, or they've got a team of robbing monkeys who steal these products for them then they sell it so it doesn't cost a penny to make them.. Idk though.

coreygeer said:

But how do they make any money at all?

So, either they're making the products with some of the cheapest resources on the planet, or they've got a team of robbing monkeys who steal these products for them

Click to expand...

Haha, I think you have something going with monkeys hypothesis...

Anyway, it's China/Singapore/Taiwan/etc. They can produce almost any plastic injected product(other materials too) on earth for nearly 10x cheaper than what you had in mind. I worked for a company where I would forward a rough sketch over by email and we would have a fully functioning prototype back within a week...

I met the mayor of Milan awhile back who was able to shed some light on the matter. He owns a food processing plant, a lighting factory, a large architecture firm, and he would just speak in obscenities about the Chinese and how they were ruining manufacturing as we know it. His take was that they do not put any "culture" into their design and production, but steal it from other cultures and try to emulate it, where he saw that they fail.

Unfortunately, that is not the case in my opinion. China is here to stay as a manufacturing superpower regardless of whether they can properly evoke "culture" or not. People like cheap, and they are getting better and better everyday at making exact replicas of electronics, clothing, and other products making it EXTREMELY difficult to sift through the inquiries from tradekey, alibaba, etc.

So that's how it works, get it made 10x cheaper, advertise for the measly $10k infomercial and cash out... I think the "toss and chop" salad tool or whatever the fuck grossed $20 million within the first few days of being on infomercials and qvc, and I can't see the entire process of that being produced more than $3-5 million...