I hope these few pieces of advice will be enough to help frame your thinking as you begin working in this cool medium. Its high visibil- ity and public forum make it one of the most exciting media you can work in—the most exciting and most public part being, perhaps, the Super Bowl. There’s nothing quite like settling in with a group of friends at the big game to see your cool idea along with a billion other people.
Things are going to get really interesting when Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) is fully rolled out and in every home. Basically, IPTV is television provided over the Internet. When it arrives, it’ll mean the convergence of all things digital in the home: computers, TV sets, digital recorders—pretty much all of it will be on one device and fed through one pipe.
Actually, all the technology exists now, but broadband speeds are going to have to go up and the price come down before IPTV really takes off. Once it does, though, it’ll be a new landscape for cus- tomers as well as advertisers. The biggest advantage to your clients is that they can customize a TV commercial not just to a zip code, not just to a neighborhood, but to a customer.
You know how Amazon.com sometimes sends a message that says, “Hey, Bob, because of your last purchase, we thought these new titles might interest you”? Well, it’s now the same thing on TV but with commercials. Say Bob lives in Chicago. And your client is a cruise line out of Miami. Maybe they co-op with the Weather Channel. So when Chicago’s temp goes below freezing, Bob gets a commercial extolling the virtues of Caribbean sailing intercut with the frozen silhouette of Chicago’s skyline. The spot ends with a spe- cial offer for snowbirds freezing their asses off in Chi-town with a cruise price that includes the exact airfare out of Midway. Bob clicks “Select” on his remote, his TV goes from the Weather Channel to Travelocity.com, and he books the trip.
Man, it’s a new world. When I was a kid, we had three channels.
And we liked it.
Figure 6.1 Just because an ad has to have a coupon in it doesn’t mean it has to suck. I think this is an elegant ad, perfect for
budget-minded book readers.
6
But Wait,There’s More!
Does direct-response TV have to suck?
THE DARK AGES PRODUCED A THINGcalled the Iron Maiden—a cof- fin with spikes on the inside that slowly skewered the victim as its lid was closed. Yet even the Dark Ages—that period of supersti- tious insanity and violence—never came up with a torture as horri- fying as Suzanne Somers telling me about all the great benefits of the ThighMaster.
The direct-response TV (DRTV) part of our industry has tradi- tionally produced some of the most horrible blather in the history of television. Richard Simmons and his Deal-A-Meal cards. The old lady in the First Alert spots who said, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” And most recently, the plague of ab workout machines: the Ab-Ripper, the Ab-inator, the Ab-Whatever. George Orwell must’ve foreseen the state of modern infomercials when he referred to advertising as “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
But here’s the deal. The guy who did that ThighMaster thing?
He’s a multimillionaire. So are Richard Simmons and Ron Popeil.
(Popeil sold his company in 2005 for $55 million.) And all those commercials you hate? They sell products by the Mall-of-America load.
Given this, it would seem we’ve come back around to Mr.
Whipple and the main question we started with: To be effective, do DRTV spots and infomercials have to suck?
I like selling things. I think it’s cool. But when I look at the Home Shopping Network and the geeky way they honk that horn when people call in, well, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. (Is it just me?) Yeah, I know they’re makin’ money hand over fist and the people who own it could buy and sell me a thousand times. But, again, it comes down to this: For me to actually work in this field of DRTV and infomercials, I need to be able to look my kids in the eyes and say, “Yeah, you should see this thing I worked on today.
It’s pretty cool.”
So, in spite of evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe DRTV spots and infomercials have to suck to be effective.
While we’re not in the majority, there are some of us who believe DRTV can do the heavy lifting required of it, and do it without toss- ing taste, intelligence, and common decency under the treads of capitalism’s tanks. Yes, DRTV has some special considerations—
rules, if you will—that help yield better results. And results are why your client comes to work every morning. Results are why more and more blue-chip clients are adding DRTV to their marketing mix. Results are why the big agency holding companies are buying up direct-response agencies left and right. But does getting results mean DRTV has to make us feel so urpy?
Well, remember the two overlapping circles in Figure 3.3? Pretend for a minute that one circle represents all the rules the DRTV spe- cialists know about how to make the phone ring and the other circle represents Things That Don’t Suck. Isn’t it possible the two circles could sometimes overlap?
Perhaps the best way to begin is by exorcising some of the horri- ble things associated with this industry.