Dear Infomercials

Tired of being ignored? Sick of taking up valuable air time? Are your ads just being made fun of instead of being effective?

Introducing a new informercial cure-all! A regular commercial!

See, the problem is you're not fooling anyone. Having 30 minutes of advertising does not make your product any more legitimate than a 45 second clip. And pretending to be a cooking show or fashion talk show or a documentary it's pretty blaringly obvious that your substance is more sparse than a 10 second Chuck-E-Cheese spot. Our attention spans aren't quite what they used to be, so just give us the goods and get out. Remember: if we liked long commercials, we would've loved all the shameless product placement in Transformers. Hey, wait...

Now, I know 30 minutes at the dead of night might be a little cheaper than 20 seconds during prime time. Heck, you could probably run your commercial twenty times on a cable channel if you wanted. But it's kind of like buying things at Costco. Just becuase soap comes in forty packs doesn't mean you should buy it, because it may end up being the smelly, gritty, odd soap that no one likes and you might be stuck using it for five years, because you're too cheap to buy nice soap. And forget about trying to catch late-night viewers with a thirty-minute ad, because they probably don't value your programming quite as much as early morning cartoons or daytime soap operas. They might not even remember your revolutionary new way of cooking steaks, or your customer testimonies might put them back to sleep.

I'm pretty sure you could save money- money that could go into the advertising division, the people who answer phones, a new coffee machine, or MAKING YOUR PRODUCT USEFUL. Maybe selling them would be easier if they worked well? If they did what they were advertised to do? If you hired better actors to pretend they liked the product? You know what, forget about improving the product. If you're going to make commercials make them awesome-superbowl awesome. Two minutes of pure action or comedy or drama would really spice up late-night television between reruns of Transformers Animated. Take a hint from State Farm insurance. They had really serious commercials about how car crashes kill children on playgrounds and that scary man would ask "ARE YOU IN GOOD HANDS?????" and then they toned down the commercials and show montages of family barbecues and game nights and the scary man would smile and ask "ARE YOU IN GOOD HANDS???". This is the opposite of what you should do.

Starting with the cheesy, happy commercials, turn it into a die-hard horror clip. Like improperly cooked meat choking the unsuspecting suburban family and poisoning Fido! Or how about juice spills that trigger ghostly attacks and supernatural horrors! Then have a scary man ask "DO YOU HAVE SHAMWOW???". That would definitely wake up the insomniac watching "paid programming". Maybe enough to pick up a telephone within the next five minutes to get the other cheap side-along knock-off for free.

I'm not satisfied with my commercials and I'm always looking for ways to make them more palatable at all hours of the night. In short, I am open for an after-school job as an advertising exec whenever you need me.