Infomercials may not exactly qualify as cutting edge. But a handful of companies think this traditional advertising medium may just be the way to promote e-commerce to a whole new audience.
Or at least so hope Minneapolis-based Virtual Technology Corporation and German K-tel International Inc. [http://www.k-tel.com/], both of which have recently started cross-promoting their e-commerce initiatives with infomercials.
Virtual Technologies is planning to promote its e-commerce site, VirtualWorld! [http://www.virtual-world.com/], through a series of 10 to 15 30-minute infomercials a week, each targeting a specific regional market. Each infomercial will be linked to the Virtual Technologies Web site, enabling consumers to click and purchase items seen in various infomercials. Most of VirtualWorld!’s wares today consist of computers and related paraphernalia, but executives say they plan to branch out.
In addition to infomercials, Virtual Technologies also plans to show virtual simulcasts of the infomercials on the Internet. This way the company hopes to reach audiences who watch TV, surf the ‘Net or use Web TV.
“This concept truly sets a precedent for our industry,” says Greg Appelhof, president and CEO of Virtual Technologies. “We feel ‘E-TV’ is the future, whereby the power of the traditional medium merges with the new medium of e-commerce and the Internet to provide an easy-to-use interface that will cater to a vast audience of proven catalog consumers.”
Germany’s K-tel International is also banking on the proven power of infomercials to boost its new e-commerce strategy. The difference is that the German company already has a well-established name in the infomercial business in Europe, with an annual spending of $10 million. It will now take that success, and use it to build and promote an e-commerce site — K-tel Shopping GmbH.
The company airs an average of 21 hours of infomercial time each week on televisions in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and parts of Poland that are German-speaking. K-tel also airs 36 hours of infomercials each week in France, Belgium and Holland. It hopes to use some of that time to drive traffic to the K-tel shopping site.
“Having been a pioneer in the German direct-to-consumer market since the mid-1980s, we are excited about the prospects for K-tel Shopping given that Germany leads Europe in e-commerce,” explains Philip Kives, K-tel chairman and CEO. “We feel that we can become one of the better known e-commerce retail sites in Central Europe,” without investing in additional advertising.
For K-tel, the expansion into e-commerce is a no-brainer. After all, the investment in setting up an e-commerce site pales in comparison to the cost of TV time. The bigger question is whether the cost of the infomercials will pay off in higher traffic to an existing site like VirtualWorld!.
Internet users are clearly influenced by what they see on television. According to Cyber Dialogue [http://www.cyberdialogue.com/], 24 percent of Internet users have accessed URLs that they saw advertised on TV. For Virtual World! and its investors, that figure better hold true.
