Here is a long list of reasons, by Steve Dworman, who makes them for a living, why infomercials are the way they are. One big reason is data: you can easily do an experiment that compares two different versions of the same commercial. It is much harder to measure the effectiveness of other forms of advertising. (The lack of data involved in most advertising choices is easy to see on Mad Men.) Self-experimentation has the same advantage: It’s so much easier to test an idea.
One of his points is about the use of celebrities: It must work, or else they wouldn’t do it. (Because there is data behind how things are done.) I think this points to something hard-wired: We want to learn from other people. That’s the default. If we have a question, we search for someone who will answer it. Learning from our own experience — such as self-experimentation — is a last resort. It feels wrong, we don’t like it. I remember feeling this way when I bought a camera. Sure, I could do extensive research about which camera is best. But that would be hard. Better to ask a friend. And then the purchase would be a link between us.
I’ve been in the business for 25 years. You use celebs to stop people when they are tuning around the channels. They are a recognizable face. Also might be some trust involved but that depends of the celeb. There are plenty of shows that worked without celebs. It’s the demos and the product benefits that matter along with testimonials from real users. People like to hear from others that something works, like you said. Testimonials are a very important part of direct response ads.
As for data, while this always distinguished direct response, TV doesn’t come close to the data now available using online forms like web sites. Testing is key to direct response, but online testing is cheaper and faster than TV testing. With TV you need more money to produce a show and run the ads, so you need a much more mainstream product for it to work. Online is different. You still have to spend some money and have the right story, but you can do it with less upfront expense. This means you can try less mainstream product ideas and concepts and they can still work.
Dan
Seth,
I’m surprised you didn’t comment on this bullet point:
“Prevention-oriented products never seem to sell. I’ve seen some amazingly produced shows that have tried to do this and failed miserably.”
Re: wanting to learn from other people. Maybe it’s adaptive. Dan Gilbert, in “Stumbling on Happiness” makes the point that if I want to know how I’ll feel after a future event, it’s best to consult someone else in that exact same situation now, instead of trying to imagine how I will feel after said event occurs. This is because we are basically rotten forecasters of our own future happiness. Our reactions to bad events are never really as bad as we imagine they will be, nor are good events ever as good as we expect they will be.
What you are saying matches up nicely to a few office stories that have puzzled me over the years.
I’ll add though, that if we want to learn from other people, we only want to learn from certain other people. Certain as defined not always rationally by us.
Certainly explains my compulsive blog reading.
Also explains why I’ve seen executives ignore problems in their organizations, especially when their own people point them out and do everything ask to “prove”.
But I’m not bitter.
Darrin, what are those puzzling office stories?
Re: Learning from others …
Coach Wooden’s latest book, ‘A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring’:
https://happybirthdayjohnwooden.com/guestbook/?page_id=9
“Mentors are all around us; they are everywhere we look. Anywhere there is a sharing of knowledge or a teaching of experience, there is a mentor. Anywhere there is an individual with life lessons to impart to an audience— more often than not, just an audience of one— there is a mentor.
I think if you truly understand the meaning of mentoring, you understand it is as important as parenting; in fact, it is just like parenting. As my father often said, “There is nothing you know that you haven’t learned from someone else.” Everything in the world has been passed down. Every piece of knowledge is something that has been shared by someone else. If you understand it as I do, mentoring becomes your true legacy. It is the greatest inheritance you can give to others. It is why you get up every day— to teach and be taught.”
It’s ancestral mimicry.
Prevention doesn’t usually work because there is no B & A, that’s before and after. This is a very strong piece of marketing used not only in infomercials but with all kinds of selling. Diets and exercise routines work great on TV because of B & A.
Prevention can work but it needs to include benefits that are immediate as well. Air purifiers. It’s really about preventing disease but they sell because of the smoke enclosed room demo. You see it working.
If I can do a demo, I can usually sell it. Read Ron Popeil’s book. His most important message is you learn how to sell a product by listening to what people ask. This tells you what benefits customers value most, then you incorporate that into your selling. Getting in front of a group of people with your product and pitching it is one of the most important parts to making it a success.
Seth asked for my puzzling office story.
I’m working away at this coding project. President is initially really excited by the project. Puts money in it. But he has no clue about programming and tech projects so he can’t lead it to profit. So eventually he quits letting anyone spend anything so were left to fend and bring ourselves to profitability with what we had. That wasn’t going to succeed.
One day the Prez holds a conference call and introduces, let’s call him Carl, the new boss. New boss will take over immediately. Old boss is not fired. Note that. Carl will run this special project and all IT operations for the entire organization.
Turns out Carl has the technical skills to make web sites backed by dbase on Windows. Carl is suspicious of our use of database servers for the organization’s contact data and this special operations critical data. Carl thinks dbase and file replication would work better. Also Carl has a web site where he resells notebooks. Carl is, can’t remember his exact age. Was it 18 or 16? One of those numbers was actually correct. I am not exaggerating. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it was 16.
Long story short, eventually old boss was running the show again (loyalty) and I left for organizations manged less badly.
Easy conclusion, the Prez is a fool.
Inconvenient fact, the Prez is no fool.
Nope. This is a big organization that he started from scratch. It’s a non profit and he can tell the story and raise money like he was born for it. What he did here and many many other times was, yes, Very Stupid(tm) but he is no fool. That’s what I found puzzling.
So now Seth brings up this really neat idea that there are two ways people learn. People like to learn from other people. People learn best from gathering data. So, hint, pick the data one.
If management problem solving is learning (it is, for the sake of argument) then there are two ways to do it. You can do it the hard way, experimentation within the business system, or trying to figure out who really “knows” and try learning from people. Hint, pick the experimenty data one.
That particular office story strikes me as the Prez couldn’t hack the experimentation when he wasn’t raising money (really really well) and turned to the people way. Only he never paid attention to anyone already close to an internal problem. They were the problem in his mind. So he always learned from the wrong people. He was constantly looking for heroes. Preferably inexpensive ones. He’s 16 and has a _web_ site on the _internet_? (It was like 1999 ish…) Hero!
CEO’s pulling in 80 million for having a confident demeanor strikes me as a similar blunder.
Deming’s quality systems were were a kind of collaborative self experiment within a business.
The scrum software development method features measurement of sprint “velocity” and retrospective meetings after each sprint to discuss and plan possible improvements.
I could go on and on.
If the theory holds: When business fails to experiment well, it inevitably turns to hero worship.
Kinda the same.
yes, I see the point very clearly. Great examples. It does explain why Deming had such a big effect — because there was so much resistance to data and it was so easy to rely on heros.
It seems to me that figuring out what to test is more of a problem than implementing the test. It’s easy to pick “safe hypothesis”, or to be overwhelmed by the huge number of factors that differ between two situations.
Here’s a website that has some real data on A/B testing of websites.
https://www.abtests.com/
Adwords allows you to test lots of different combinations of each of the 4 lines of an ad. And, will automatically show better performing ads more than worse performing ads.
Seth, you’ve got a real talent for picking the right experiment. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve skill in this area?
Thanks, Evelyn.How to pick the right experiment? My advice is to do the simplest easiest experiment that will tell you something. This is inevitably much simpler and easier than others recommend. In my experience, researchers, like everyone else, (a) underestimate the difficulty of their plan and (b) overestimate their knowledge of what will happen. The pleasant corollary of (b) is that you can learn much more easily than you think.