chicagohh - 6:00 pm on Oct 27, 2004 (gmt 0)

I spent a year (IT Director) with a small company that started running infomercials. When I first joined, we were shipping 20 to 50 units per day from national magazine ads, trade shows etc. In a year, I left to do my own thing. By then we were shipping over 5000 units 6 days a week. All this gain was through infomercials.

but the key is that they don't actually make the products until after thay have built up a significant number of orders, hence the 6-8 week delivery time

My understanding is that would be illegal. The FTC has a lot of rules governing airwaves. One of them is you must have product in order to run ads.

The first shoot cost over $100,000. The second version cost over $250,000. The owner was a madman and would cause all kinds of problems during the shoot.

As was pointed out in an above post - you can purchase after hours spots, small market spots or niche channel spots at a discount.

Something that can be done for those on a budget -
Many media outlets will let your run your spots on net 15 or 30. You run the spot, generate sales, grab the money and then pay off the media with the money from the sales.

The ROI is NOT the same as what SEM pros expect. In the infomercial world, if you are getting a 3 to 1 return your beating the odds (spend $1 to make $3). On the positive side:

Scalability

When things were running smooth, we would run $1 million in TV spots during a week and receive $3 million in sales. It was like clockwork. After all the expenses the owner was making $500,000 each week.

I still see their infomercials on from time to time.