Infomercial
An infomercial is a form of television commercial that resembles regular TV programming[1] yet is intended to promote or sell a product, service or idea.
[2] Most often used as a form of direct response television (DRTV), they are often program‑length commercials[1] (long-form infomercials), and are typically 28:30 or 58:30 minutes in length.
This phenomenon started in the United States, where infomercials were typically shown overnight and early morning (usually 1:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.), outside peak prime time hours for commercial broadcasters.
Some stations also choose to air infomercials during the daytime hours, mostly on weekends, to fill in for unscheduled network or syndicated programming.
[7] Washington, D.C.–based National Infomercial Marketing Association was formed in late 1990; by 1993, "it had more than 200" members committed to standards "with teeth".
When used this way, the term may be meant to carry an implication that the party making the communication or political speech is exaggerating truths or hiding important facts.
As in any other form of advertisement, the content is a commercial message designed to represent the viewpoints and to serve the interest of the sponsor.
[1] However, most do not have specific TV formats but craft different elements to tell what their creators hope is a compelling story about the product offered.
[citation needed] The products frequently marketed through infomercials at the national level include cleaning products, appliances, food-preparation devices, dietary supplements, alternative health aids, memory improvement courses, books, compilation albums, videos of numerous genres, real estate investment strategies, beauty supplies,[13] baldness remedies, sexual-enhancement supplements, weight-loss programs and products, personal fitness devices, home exercise machines and adult chat lines.
[citation needed] Uses for infomercials in the early 1990s included offering free trials of personal care products such as enhanced plaque removers; an 800-number was used to collect basic marketing information.
[citation needed] Automobile dealerships, attorneys and jewelers are among the types of businesses that air infomercials on a local level.
[citation needed] During the early days of television, many television shows were specifically created by sponsors with the main goal of selling their product, the entertainment angle being a hook to hold audience's attention (this is how soap operas got their name; such shows were sponsored by soap manufacturers).
A good example of this is the early children's show The Magic Clown on NBC, which was created essentially as an advertisement for Bonomo's Turkish Taffy.
[21] Eventually, limits imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the amount of advertising that could appear during an hour of television did away with these programs, forcing sponsors into the background; however, a few infomercials, mainly those for greatest hits record sets (which could get around the restrictions by devoting much of the airtime to snippets of the songs on the records, which did not count as advertising) and Shop Smith power tools,[22] did exist during the period when commercial time was restricted.
[24] Infomercials proliferated in the United States after 1984 when the Federal Communications Commission eliminated regulations that were established in the 1950s and 1960s to govern the commercial content of television.
[2][b] Infomercials particularly exploded in the mid-1990s with motivational and personal development products, and "get-rich-quick schemes" based on the premise that one could quickly become wealthy by either selling anything through classified ads or through flipping.
[36] The word "teleshopping" was coined in 1979 by Michael Aldrich, who invented real-time transaction processing from a domestic television and subsequently installed many systems throughout the UK in the 1980s.
[citation needed] TiVo formerly used paid programming time weekly on the Discovery Channel on early Thursday mornings and Ion Television on early Wednesday mornings to record interactive and video content to be presented to subscribers in a form of linear datacasting without the need to interfere with a subscriber's internet bandwidth (or lack thereof if they solely used the machine's dialup connection for updating).
[43] Teleworld Paid Program was quietly discontinued at the start of the 2016–17 television season as the company's install base had mostly transitioned to broadband and newer TiVo devices no longer included a dialup option.
[46] In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that any infomercial 15 minutes or longer must disclose to viewers that it is a paid advertisement.
A "paid programming" bug in a corner of the screen during infomercials, particularly for financial products, is to avoid an exploitation of an "as seen on" claim of endorsement.
[citation needed] Since the 1990s, federal and state customer protection agencies have criticized several prominent infomercial pitchmen, including Kevin Trudeau, Donald Barrett and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Lesko, and also Don Lapre, a salesman notorious for his get-rich-quick schemes.
[citation needed] Programs that collect donations or sell via Premium-rate telephone number (900-number) have additional disclosure requirements.
[61] The Adult Swim late-night block of cable channel Cartoon Network has often broadcast an anthology of comedy shorts in the early-morning hours, concealed in program schedules under the title "Infomercials" to provide a false impression that legitimate paid programming had been scheduled in that time slot.
[70] One week before the 2008 general election, Obama purchased a 30-minute slot at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time during primetime on seven major networks (NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Fox, BET, TV One and Univision (with Spanish subtitles)) to present a "closing argument" to his campaign.
The combination of these networks reportedly drew a peak audience of over 33 million viewers of the half-hour program, making it the single most watched infomercial broadcast in the history of U.S.
"[73] Although not meeting the definition of an infomercial per se, animated children's programming in the 1980s and early 1990s, which included half-hour animated series for franchises such as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, My Little Pony, and Transformers, were often described as being marketing vehicles for related toy lines and tie-in products advertised during commercial breaks.
In general, worldwide use of the term refers to a television commercial (paid programming) that offers product for direct sale to persons via response through the web, by phone, or by mail.
For example, in the early 1990s, long form paid programming in Canada was required to consist only of photographs without moving video (this restriction no longer exists).
What may be called infomercials are most commonly found in North and South America, Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia.
