Are ‘infomercials’ still valid?

Published December 10, 2014 at 7:04 am

In an age when television viewing was localized, the program-length infomercial was a staple of regular viewing. Is there a place for this kind of marketing today, though, when so many users are spending time in the instant-gratification environment of the internet? The important thing, ultimately, is that your business uses automatic marketing to sync campaigns harmoniously.

That way, if you do decide to use an infomercial or other long-form medium, it will match the message delivered across all of the other materials that you use. It’s important to address as many different types of viewers as possible through media that target long and short attention spans.

Writing for Entrepreneur, contributor Kedma Ough mentions that infomercials (or Direct Response Television, aka DRTV) are only appropriate in certain cases, when the product naturally lends itself to this strategy.

“Not all products are well suited for DRTV success,” she writes. “It is a rapid roll out process, where a product generally moves through a short selling life cycle at a highly accelerated pace.” As for the items that are appropriate, she says that the products on display “need to be highly demonstrable.”

The key to any medium, as an article in Business2Community recently asserted, could be telling a story. No matter how that narrative is conveyed, the important thing is that the viewer gets a strong sense of what you’re communicating and why it’s important.

For services that are less tangible and more suited to fast-paced internet marketing, find the kind of combination of automatic marketing strategies that best suits the campaign and the way your audience will be accessing your materials. Even if you don’t produce infomercials, you can make content with the same focus on demonstration and easy engagement and then promote it through the appropriate means.