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NEWSLETTER
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Volume 19, July 10, 2001
WOMEN DRIVERS IN THE MARKETPLACE - IN DRTV, THEY HOLD NEARLY ALL THE LICENSES!
By Edward Easton
The more things change, the more they stay the same-but not always. In the days before women's lib, the "little woman" pretty much stayed home. Most of them cooked, cleaned, did grocery shopping and watched over the kids. And during the interim they watched a lot of television - daytime television.
Who has any doubt that soap operas were created with the women's audience in mind? Madison Avenue learned early on that women were the most lucrative market they had not only during the day, but at night as well, and thus they gave us Dinah Shore telling us to see the USA in our Chevrolets and Bess Myerson selling us General Electric kitchen appliances. This was the advertising norm for decades, until a funny thing happened. Not long after women's lib came on strong, so did sports programming on cable TV, and as cable grew and diversified, so did the male niche on TV. You never see any Hotpoint or Maytag ads during a ballgame on TV. You do see beer ads, muscle car ads, and Bowflex ads-all traditional Male demographics. But at no time did this innovative male niche ever threaten the female demographic, and in fact, the women are again gaining ground during traditional male broadcasting. Take Bowflex for example. You are now apt to see as many female bodies flexing at
the cables as you are men. Beer and wine ads-same phenomenon. There's no getting around it, guys. Women rule in the marketplace. If you want to sell something on TV, the smart money markets to the ladies. Leading industry market indicators say they make up 70 to 80% of the market for just
about anything you can think of that gets sold on television.
That's true of mainstream television advertising, and especially so of DRTV infomercials. Eight out of ten times, it's the woman of the house who's answering the call to action in your infomercial. It's her credit card your telemarketers are taking on those sales calls.
Increasingly, bigger and bigger female stars are being lured as spokeswomen for not only their own products (like Connie Selleca) but others as well.
The big stars are being lured by big bucks, and not necessarily on the front end. More and more, the bigger names are taking their chances along with the entrepreneurs and the marketers in the infomercial business. There is that much money to be made!
This means you don't have to be capitalized up to the nines to get your product on the air. It just has to be targeted toward the fair sex and offer them something they can't get elsewhere for less. Women are increasingly demanding consumers. They love a bargain and they are traditional impulse buyers. But today's female consumer is now much more canny than ever before. You can't offer her fluff and convince her it's substance. But if she senses good value, she'll buy!
Vanna White, Joan Lunden, Leeza Gibbons, Melissa Gilbert, Kathy Lee Gifford... these are all names to conjure with in today's infomercial market-and if your product is good, you don't need a million up front to attract them as pitchwomen.
"At InfoWorx, we recognized early on the power of the female spokesperson; the campaign we put on for "Beauty Up Close" did phenomenally well. Using a soap star like Jackie Zeman to sell the product was the perfect example of mating the right star with exactly the right product."-Ron Perlstein, Executive producer.
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LATEST JORDAN WHITNEY RANKINGS
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1. CARLETON SHEETS
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2. BUN & THIGH ROCKER
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3. BOWFLEX
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| 4. TURBO-COOKER
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5. EPIL STOP AND SPRAY
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6. ABDOER
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7. IONIC BREEZE QUADRA
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8. CALMAX
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9. RELIANT COMPUTER
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10. STEAM BUGGY
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