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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
V. Developing the
Integrated Marketing
Communications Program
If you don’t know the answer to the above question,
perhaps a few more hints will help. What if
we added Monsters, Excite@Home, and the Indy
Races to the list? That’s right, all of the above are
sponsors of infomercials—an advertising form
that has long been considered appropriate only
for Ronco Vegematics, Whopper Choppers, and
Dione Warwick’s Psychic Friends.
The infomercial, or—as those in the industry
like to refer to it—long-form advertisement, is a
30- to 60-minute television segment designed to
provide the viewer with a great deal of information
and detail about a product or service. In
effect, infomercials are long commercials designed
to provide information as well as to sell. You will
usually see long-form ads late at night, in the
wee hours of the morning, or at any time when
the advertising rates are at their lowest. As a
result, this ad form has long been the domain of
smaller, direct-response companies. But all that is
changing.
The new infomercials are no longer lowbudget
productions that attempt only to sell, sell,
14. Direct Marketing © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
What Do Ab Rockers, Ginsu Knives, Mercedes,
and Kitchen Appliances Have in Common?
sell. And low-audience spots are no longer their
only medium. Mercedes-Benz recently aired an
infomercial for its E320 on national cable networks.
The long-form ad, titled “The Mark of Passion,”
was very expensive looking
and plugged the Starmark used-car
program through archival footage
and testimonials from very satisfied
owners. Excite’s objective was to
provide information on its complex
products and services and to
demonstrate the advantages of
broadband. Monster.com’s “Monster
Show” included a number of
specific features, such as the “Learn
to Love Monday Morning Quiz,”
which measures satisfaction with
one’s current employer. While the
infomercials had a sales component, other measures
of success were also employed. Mercedes’s
ads directed the viewers to learn more about the
Starmark program by calling a toll-free number or
logging on to the Starmark website (70 percent of
the viewers used the website). Once there, information
was collected for the development of a
database and for mailings with additional information.
Monster tracked activity on various
aspects of the website.
But why use an infomercial for household
appliances? Can’t they just be sold through regular
advertising and retail outlets? And, at an
average price of $369.95 per appliance, isn’t that a
bit expensive for this medium? No and no says
Brian Maynard, director of integrated marketing
for KitchenAid, a 90-year-old company out of Benton
Harbor, Michigan. The highly competitive
market requires different thinking and different