My wife thinks I am crazy. I have been drawn into watching the infomercial that GMC has been showing on cable. The 30 minute advertisement highlights key areas of comparsions and shows with graphics and video clips how they match up with their competition. The engineers who designed the vehicles tell the stories. Throughout, GMC is pushing you to their website for a chance to win a truck and find out more.
The infomercial as a form of advertising has been long reserved for food preparation devices and excerise equipment. I think this form of advertising has alot of potential for complex products. It gives you the time needed to talk about a variety of points. You can use both vivid sight and sound.
There is a home builder in Milwaukee that does a weekly infomercial on Sunday mornings. Each week they talk about a different part of the home building process. They talk with vendors about everything from flooring to fixtures. All along the way, they educate viewers on things to consider when they build their own home.
I think tourism would be a natural also. Disney could talk about the parks and new properties. New Zealand could show their mountains, glaciers, and fjords. Locally, Wisconsin Dells could highlight the water parks, the water parks next to hotels, and the water parks attached to hotels.
I should mention the only reason have seen the GMC infomercial. As a new father, you run across all sorts of things on early morning cable television.
Your point is even more widely applicable.
There are lots of situations where ads SHOULD contain a lot of information, but they rarely do. Think of a magazine ad for any sort of technical or complex product. When I’m thinking of buying a machine, I would love to have a whole page of fine text giving me information on it. But the ads are always just teasers, leaving me to go hunting for reasons to buy their product. Stupid. A maddening waste.
Or think of the ads in subway stations or on buses. A captive audience has time to really learn why a product is superior–but it’s never taken advantage of…
just what we need, more garbage on television and less content in magazines. Why not have a channel that only plays infomercials it would probably be as popular as the channel dedicated to the cable company and how to set up your modem and digital cable.
I do see the point your making, but I dont think infomercials would be the median to get that information across. If some companies put more effort into their websites it seems like that would work better. Then people can pick and choose what they want to look at instead of having to wait until the infomercial they wanted to see was showing on tv.