Long-form TV has been so bad for so long that the infomercial has become one of the most parodied communication forms on the planet. Saturday Night Live’s “Bass-O-Matic” fish blender was a memorable skewering. More recently, Crispin Porter ⫹Bogusky parodied the long form by manufacturing and selling silly made-for- TV accessories for the MINI Cooper. Interestingly, they made the MINI infomercials so delightfully dreadful, there was no loss of points to the brand. Viewers knew.
Okay, so what if you have to create an infomercial and you can’t suck, even on purpose? Here are a few things I’ve learned from some of the smart DRTV folks I’ve come to know.
Before you get to the concept, write the CTA.
Again, writing the CTA comes first. It’s the most important part of the infomercial. All the same CTA advice from short form applies here. How long it is depends on the product or service, but boiling your offer down is a good exercise in clarity. You’ll be forced to think through the most logical and compelling way to express it.
Have a unique TV offer in your CTA.
When what’s being sold on TV is also available in stores, DRTV specialists know that fewer phone orders will come in. (Customers say, “Feh! We’ll buy it at the store.”) Therefore, it pays to make your TV offer unique. It builds in urgency and makes the proposition of calling more logical. Anything else you can do to add to the unique- ness of the offer and its urgency, do so. If it’s a limited-time offer, say so. Anything that overcomes couch inertia is good.
Add an incentive on top of the offer.
First you lay out the basic offer. Then when you get to the CTA, you sweeten the deal with an incentive of some kind. (Yes, this is the genesis of that tired old line: “But wait! There’s more.”) Yet it’s here where the real science of DRTV comes in. Experienced direct- response marketers have found that by rotating different incentives and measuring the difference in sales they can, as James Twitchell says, “readjust the pitch until they find the point of harmonic con- vergence.” Since 75 to 95 percent of all phone calls are made within 30 minutes of broadcast, the marketer can tell exactly which offers and incentives are working best; then they readjust. They fiddle with the media buy, the offer, the incentive, the edit, always compar- ing the new results against a control.
Bring in the phone number at just the right time.
If you put your client’s phone number up on screen in the first two seconds and then leave it up till the end, you may end up actually losing your client money instead of making them money. Think it through. If you put up the phone number before you’ve fully explained what it is that you’re selling, you’re likely to get thou- sands of phone calls from people who ultimately reject the offer because they haven’t heard the whole offer or they don’t know the details. Let the show be its own self-selecting mechanism. Let your story play out. Putting up an 800 number after the offer is spelled out will net a higher rate of sales even though the number of calls will be lower. (Plus you won’t tie up your client’s call center with people who happen to have a cool new cell phone, but all their friends are asleep.)
You’ve got 30 minutes of time. Find a big stage to play on.
The infomercial writer’s primary goal is to motivate an immediate response. The secondary goal, and nearly as important, is to keep viewers watching as long as possible.
Once you’ve boiled down your offer in your call to action, it’s time to draw a concept out of it. And now, for a little while, you can think the same way you do when you concept for brand print or TV.
You’re searching for the story and the emotion in the product. You might find it in the product or it may come out of what you know
about the customer. You may find it in problem-solution architec- ture or in simple storytelling. And long form is a great place to tell a story. Remember Ken Burns’s Civil War—just a voice-over and black-and-white photographs, yet it was riveting.
In the 30-second brand image world, we try to reward our viewers for staying with us by entertaining them. DRTV is no different. Long form can reward viewers with interesting content above and beyond the sell copy. As an example, I refer to a long-form show done by Mark Fenske for a brand of golf club, a putter called Never Compromise (Figure 6.3). The show had an interesting story at its core: A famous golfer named Jean Van de Velde used a putter to play the entire course at a famous Scottish golf course, a course where he’d failed the previous summer in a world-cup sort of game. I’m not even a golfer and it was fascinating. They’d cut between scenes of the golf pro whacking long fairway shots with a putter, and then cut to detailed product information segments where the VO explained the special way the putter was made. Viewers who stayed with it got to watch a famous golf pro talk about a difficult game he played on a famous course in Scotland, all while playing 18 holes with a putter.
Build your idea out in segments.
The average unit of TV time that American couch potatoes eat in one sitting is 8 to 10 minutes. With network programming, that’s
Figure 6.3 Jean Van de Velde walks through the March cold of Scotland’s Carnoustie golf course in Fenske’s fascinating
long-form spot for Never Compromise putters.
what they’re used to anyway—8 to 10 minutes of sitcom, then a pod of commercials. So it may make sense to build your infomercial the same way, perhaps in three self-contained segments.
8 to 10 minutes of selling Call to Action #1
8 to 10 minutes of selling Call to Action #2
Final 8- to 10-minute segment Final Call to Action #3
Network viewing habits aren’t the only reason this format seems to work. Marketers have found that half of an infomercial’s viewers watch for 20 minutes or more and the other half watch for 20 min- utes or less. By completing a selling cycle in 10 minutes, you’re ensuring that most people who watch will have an opportunity to place an order.
Do not suck.
What? We covered it? Never mind.
Move back and forth between rational and emotional.
Don’t stay too long in either place. After you’ve rolled out two or three rational benefits, swing over to the emotional side and remind the viewer of the higher emotional state the product appeals to. Is it joy or security? Safety or vanity? Whatever that higher-level emo- tion is, connect to it; connect what you’re selling to that stuff which really drives us as people. Then go back to laying out rational sup- port for buying now. You’ll find that going back and forth recharges each side.
Testimonials can work.
When done correctly, seeing and hearing a real person talk about a product or service can be compelling. Doing it correctly means you have to interview hundreds of customers to find those few, that handful of people who are both comfortable on camera and come across as real people. There’s nothing like a true believer to extol the virtues of a brand.
Currently, most infomercials shoot fakey testimonials in fake sets that feel like the fake lobby of a fake hotel. Shooting on site seems more credible. The U.S. Navy’s recruiting DRTV did this particularly well, showing real people talking about their service on the aircraft carriers, submarines, and other really cool locations.
Bose speakers also went on location for their show, and instead of testimonials, they used third-party experts. To tout the value of their sound quality for home entertainment systems, they did long interviews with sound engineers in Hollywood, audio experts who talked at length about how much work they put into creating sound effects for movies. It was interesting content and, to audio- philes, relevant.