28 Business View Magazine - September 2016
The Electronic Retailing Association
Representing the direct response industry
Since its formative days, television has been an adver-
tising medium. Indeed, many of America’s earliest TV’s
shows were created specifically by sponsors whose
main goal was the selling of their products; “soap op-
eras” were created to peddle soap – their ongoing sto-
ries were merely vehicles to keep viewers tuning in so
that the advertising could “take.” Infomercials came
along in the 1970s as program-length combinations
of information and a sponsor’s commercial message.
They often featured their own celebrity spokespersons
and they were designed to solicit a direct response
(DR) from a viewer, often claiming that a particular
product was “not sold in stores.”
Infomercials proliferated in the United States after
1984, when the Federal Communications Commis-
sion eliminated regulations that were established in
the 1950s and 1960s to govern the commercial con-
tent of television. They were often shown during the
late night/early morning hours, when TV broadcast
time was least expensive. Today, an infomercial can be
seen on TV at any time of the day or night with some
