Infomercial

You could probably never afford to run a 30-minute commercialfor your business. But on public access cable television, you canalmost certainly put on a 30-minute infomercial promoting yourselfand your business. For instance, the owner of an antique shop couldhost a weekly show on finding, restoring and pricing antiques. Or acar repair specialist could host a weekly car care show. Thepossibilities are endless.

There’s a lot to be said for being able to give a livedemonstration of your product so that consumers can actually seehow it works–how easy or difficult it is, how large or small, howsharp or dull, or how effective. This is a form of advertising youdon’t want to attempt yourself. Hire a professional to guide youthrough this multi-faceted process. Even television stations aren’tset up to handle the making of an infomercial from beginning toend. They don’t have the capability to provide the set design,scripts, show format, celebrity acquisition and testimonials, justto name a few of the elements that go into the process. They canshoot the footage in the beginning and edit the whole thingtogether at the end, but everything in-between is out of theirrealm.

Most advertising agencies can help you with the production ofyour infomercial. They can be responsible for such pre-productiondetails as budgeting, scouting locations, promotion and publicrelations, research, any construction needed, and much more. Onesolution is to hire an advertising agency to create the “pieces,”such as the testimonials, the set designs, the scripts and thetalent, and then bring everything to the TV station to put it alltogether. Your television sales reps may also be able to recommendcompanies, such as Hawthorne Direct or ProducersDirect in your vicinity that can handle your project from startto finish. To find a company in your area, run a Google search for”DRTV production companies.”

Your infomercial will seldom be watched by anyone from beginningto end, so you must break up the half-hour show into separate,interesting segments with a “closer” or “call to action” at the endof each segment. While your toll-free phone number, website URLand/or P.O. box address should stay on the screen at all times, a”closing” segment should take place every ten minutes or so toencourage people to buy immediately or to offer a list of storelocations where the product can be found. Then move right on to anew segment.

Keep your messages moving. For instance, a car dealership mayshowcase its used cars in one segment, then move on to its servicedepartment, then present its new cars, then show testimonials. Theidea is to keep the audiences interested without boring them todeath and to keep the half-hour fluid.

Businesses with products that don’t change much over time canmore easily recover the cost of making an infomercial because theycan produce just one and use it for years. But the infomercials forsome businesses have a much shorter shelf-life because the footageis constantly becoming outdated (the car dealership, for example).Owners of these type of businesses need to continually bear thecost of revising or creating entirely new productions year afteryear.

Infomercials take time to produce. For instance, if you want toinclude testimonials, you have to find the right people and,depending on the product, you may even have to travel to shootfootage of them. Multiply your travel costs by the number oftestimonials you want to use in your infomercial, and you can seethat just that portion can take a week or more. When all is saidand done, you can probably add another week or more for selectingyour music, editing the footage, and getting the copies (dubs) madefor whatever stations you’ll be running it on.

When it comes to televising your infomercials, you’ll spendanywhere from $100 to $3,000 per spot, on average, to buy actualair time. Since most of these ads run overnight and on theweekends, the per-spot cost isn’t quite as high as it would beduring any other time of the day or evening. It all ads up–it’snot territory for the faint of heart or the small of budget toexplore. And because you won’t know if your infomercial is a goodone–meaning one that works–until it actually airs, it only makessense that you start with professionals who know the ins and outsof creating infomercials to give yourself the best chance ofsuccess. And for this reason, you’ll want to test your longcommercial in a small market and not cast a wide net until you knowif it’s working for you!

Although the industry’s reputation is improving, there are stillinfomercials that may make this form of advertising difficult to beassociated with. Psychic readers, get-rich-quick schemes, and allthose too-good-to-be-true infomercials where they say you can loseweight without any effort make it hard for others to be takenseriously. So be sure that if you use infomercials, you followthrough with your fulfillment and return policies–and that yourproduct or service lives up to what you promise your audience.