There’s a decent amount of discussion around what Seth Godin and others have termed interruption media.  For those new to the term:

Interruption media advertising is advertising based on the idea that a consumer is given entertainment, information, etc. and that is then interrupted to serve an ad to the audience, whether it’s a print ad in the middle of your Cat Fancy magazine article, a banner ad along the top of a CNN.com story or a TV spot during Grey’s Anatomy.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of direct response TV advertising. Part of the beauty behind the half hour TV infomercial is that it is NOT interruption advertising in my opinion.  Yes you could argue that the “interruption” occurs as you’re flipping from one thing you’re watching to another but by and large if you watch a half hour infomercial you are very clearly choosing to do so.  So why do people choose to watch these often ridiculous selling pitches?  Entertainment and Education.  Who doesn’t get a kick out of the shows like the Magic Bullet or watching Billy Mays hawking another cleaning product or appliance?

So can long-form infomercials continue to be viable as viewers move more and more to on-demand entertainment?  It certainly poses an interesting question and certainly raises the bar for the marketer to both entertain and educate.  Heck, I’d love to see Comcast offer me on-demand infomercials and tell me which ones are highest ranked by viewers.  What if they could not only rate the show but also the product (if they’ve rec’d it).  The good shows would certainly rise to the top and the people with the biggest budgets but crappy products may not always be the winners.  Could be quite interesting.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:02 am and is filed under DR Marketing, Deep thoughts, Infomercials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.