Corporate Videos and Infomercials!! 175essentially to inform the public that the Boys Club wants to
reach out... so that’s the workhorse... they take these videos
around to various schools that they are trying to get Boys Club
kids into... prep schools, particularly on the East coast, to show
the kinds of things that the Boys Club is doing... but it’s moti-
vational and fund-raising more than anything else... in this
context, it’s more documentary in nature, and through storytell-
ing in documentary fashion, you can get people involved, and
they kind of get the feeling of what you are doing, and it
becomes motivational, and the motivation, of course, becomes
one of financial gift giving.Music for corporate videos is a hybrid between scoring commercials and
scoring documentaries. It provides composers with an opportunity to be
creative without the restrictions of a shorter format.
Infomercials
Infomercials are long-form commercials that usually run either 30 or 60
minutes, which is the length of an average television program. (Infomer-
cials are also played on the radio but less frequently than on television.)
They are advertisements.Infomercials are designed to prompt immediate con-
sumer response.Customersareencouragedtocallatoll-freenumberor
access an Internet site, which enables them to order the product.
Another form of infomercial is called direct-response television (a.k.a.
DRTV). Most DRTV infomercials have a duration of 1 or 2 minutes but are
sometimes longer or shorter. As with long-form infomercials, the goal is
to receive an immediate direct response from the audience—sales.
Although infomercials are designed to result in immediate phone or
Internet sales, surveys have shown a direct correlation between the show-
ing of infomercials and increased sales in retail stores.
Airtime
Since most infomercials are broadcast at unusual hours—mostly after
midnight—this presents an opportunity to purchase airtime at inexpen-
sive rates. Media companies purchase bulk time and resell it to infomercial
companies. Both cable and broadcasting time is available, but the majority
of the bulk time is on cable channels.
A survey showed that 15 percent of all televisions are on at 1:00a.m.
and that more than 66 percent of cable television viewers surf the chan-
nels. This presents an opportunity for the viewers to watch an infomercial.
Sometimes it is difficult to tell when a program is an infomercial until the
hard sell occurs. Many celebrities have successfully promoted products in