As Not Seen On TV: Infomercials Continue Slide

LOS ANGELES- Full-line retailers have often stated the importance of infomercial product to create a buzz and drive traffic. If you ask retailers, 1998 was the year without an infomercial. If you ask professionals from the infomercial industry, fitness was not the only segment feeling the pinch from a lack of TV firepower.
"Last year was not a great year for anybody," said Steve Dworman, publisher of the Infomercial Marketing Report, a newsletter that has been tracking the industry for eight years. "Overall, infomercial sales were down about 20 percent from last year."
The newsletter's annual ranking of the top-10 grossing infomercials of '98 includes five from the diet and fitness category. But to many dealers' chagrin, only two of those were equipment-based.
This year's first-place infomercial was a diet product, Bioslim, from Thane Marketing. Emphasizing the lackluster year for infomercials, first-place BioSlim grossed $80 million for the year, which was a $15 million drop from last year's champion-Fitness Quest's Total Gym.
Total Gym, which the newsletter calls "a phenomenon unto itself," came in third this year in overall sales despite using the same show for the third-straight year. It recently began airing a new program featuring its long-time stars Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley.
"We have bucked the trend with the success of the Total Gym," said Dave Petersilge, VP of retail sales for Canton, OH-based Fitness Quest. "It proves that with a sound product and some star appeal, television can still work-even if not everything you put on the air is a success." In fact, Fitness Quest is hoping to buck the trend again with the recent launch of the Torso Track abdominal trainer starring Suzanne Summers, which the company says has had good initial viewer response.
"Right now, [infomercial business] is in a real funk," Petersilge said. "It is in a down trend, but life is cyclical and it will turn around."
Part of the funk in the infomercial industry stems from the economics of doing business in today's television market, according to Dworman. "Media rates are up 400 percent and there is a 40-percent degradation in viewership," he said. "There used to be eight channels for viewers to choose from; now there are as many as 90 [channels] that a cable or satellite network will offer. Its the same problem network TV stations are facing."
Despite a number of entries over the past year, particularly in the elliptical category, the only other equipment-based infomercial to crack the top 10 was the Timeworks show from Quantum. Diet and nutrition programs held the remaining three spots reserved for the diet and fitness category.
"Elliptical is a great example of how the industry can overreact," Petersilge said. "It is a case of producing the product before you sell it. It has to be done the other way around."
Despite the industry being on a downward trend, Dworman is still hopeful that infomercials will rebound-particularly in the fitness category.
"Nothing has been proven to break a brand new product as well," he said. "When the products eventually go into retail, they usually do quite well there, too."
Even successful TV-driven companies like Fitness Quest are not putting their eggs in one basket. The company is working toward the continuing strength of what it deems the "traditional" side of the business. In fact at Super Show, the company will unveil a revamped line of benches, bikes and more-under the Integrity and Edge brands, which it acquired from Maurice Pinkoffs in '98. "We see the traditional products as a large growth piece for us going forward," Petersilge concluded. (Broadcast)