How to Buy Infomercial Time on Cable TV Networks

Launching an infomercial can be an exciting and rewarding experience. It is also an expensive and risky endeavor. According to Spot On Media, airtime can range from $150 to $12,000 for a 30-minute spot of airtime for an infomercial. Careful research has to be conducted to ensure the people viewing your infomercial are also the ones most interested in buying your product. Finding a station willing to allow you time in their schedule can be tricky, but it can be done.

Instructions

1. Choose your market. Television advertising is usually broken into three market categories: national, primary and secondary. National markets are either cable stations or superstations in major markets (think MTV and WGN, respectively). Primary markets consist of local network affiliate stations in large metropolitan areas of at least 1 million viewers. Secondary markets are stations in smaller locations with fewer than 500,000 viewers.

2. Test the market. To help your sales pitch to media outlets, you will need to show you conducted market testing and research to determine if your infomercial will be viewed. It is best to do the testing in a secondary market, for two reasons. First, it is much cheaper to test in a smaller market. Second, it is much easier to test target marketing on a small scale than it is on a large one, so if you have a particular target market you want to see your infomercial, select a secondary market that meets your demographics. For a start in finding the right market, you can use a website directory such as Mondo Times to get a listing of stations in a specific demographic area.

3. Pitch your infomercial. Take the research you gained from Step 2 and create your infomercial or make the changes the research suggests. Make several copies of the completed infomercial and send them to the stations you have targeted to broadcast your infomercial. The stations will need to approve your infomercial before they will let you buy airtime, and the approval process can take from a day to several weeks.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider using a media broker. Media brokers are companies that sell airtime to stations. Instead of contacting each station yourself, the broker will do the negotiating for you, so you have one contact instead of many. They earn a commission on the amount of airtime they sell.

• Start small, have a budget and stick to it. Infomercials are expensive on the front end, so know how much you can afford to spend on both production and marketing. It is better to have a high-quality infomercial in a small, targeted market and grow from there than to blow your budget on a lesser-quality infomercial in a larger, less targeted market.

• Know your competition! If there is another product with an infomercial already in circulation that is similar to yours, you are going to have a hard sell with stations. You'll either have to make sure you are not overlapping markets with your competition or give your infomercial a different "spin" to make it different from your competition.

References

• Spot On Media
• Mondo Times

Resources

• Infomercial TV Definitions
• U.S. TV Households By Market