It’s 3 A.M. You’re wide awake, so you flip on the TV and somewhere in between the Public Access stations and reruns of Law & Order, you settle on a program. The alarm goes off a few hours later and in a sleepy haze you check your email. At some point between then and now you’ve ordered a set of P-90X DVDs, a Shake Weight, a ShamWow and a Ronco Rotisserie Oven. You think to yourself: “What on earth happened last night?” Welcome to the power of The Infomercial.

You probably know that Infomercials are program length ads, aimed at driving direct sales via the art of persuasion tactics. What you might not know is that the Infomercial industry is estimated to be valued at over $250 Billion by the end of 2015. That’s a lot of Snuggies.

Serious business

This promotion formula is no longer just for gimmicky goods anymore – large brands understand the value these kinds of direct response marketing campaigns can bring to their business. The expansion of DR business into household name brands like P&G, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz and Walmart makes that $250 Billion figure a lot easier to imagine. That kind of investment makes the need to understand the market and its subsequent consumers even more important.

There are some quintessential components of a successful infomercial.

• Establish a Need

• Show your Product in Action

• Secure some Testimonials

• Create Urgency

Identifying these tactics is the easy part of direct response marketing. What really gets a consumer to take action though?

Today, marketers of all sizes utilize a variety of strategies to answer the hardest, simple question out there: “Did we get it right?”

Does this sound familiar? [Boss screams down the hall] “Once you get the results back from the various focus groups, those creative A/B tests we ran, the findings from that Research Firm you hired, the printout from the Web Analytics tool, the comments from the social media campaigns, and the analysis of the pre and post sales figures, then let’s schedule a meeting to review.”

A new approach

All of these tools are important, but they can be a costly, time-consuming mess of an endeavor, that at the end of the day just leave you with a bunch of spreadsheets. We’re all trying to understand how people feel about things because that informs whether they’re interested or not. So why do some of the most common types of evaluation have absolutely nothing to do with real people?

Emotions are universal. Paul Ekman, one of the pioneers in the field of Sentiment Analysis in the 20th century, concluded that humans across both Eastern and Western cultures displayed the same basic facial expressions for a variety of common emotions. This makes interpreting people's reactions a fairly standardized practice. Emotions also greatly influence our decisions. This means that emotions have an impact on business, contributing heavily to a company’s bottom line.

“For understanding high-involvement purchase habits as well as viral behavior, there's no question that emotions are key.”

– Dr. Jeff Lee, Consumer Behavior & Emotions Specialist, MIT Sloan (Marketing)

What’s the impact of having Emotion Data? How can it help your business? As an example, here’s a quick sentiment analysis of some of the best and worst infomercials out there, generated from the Project Look tool created by Kairos:

What could you or your company do with data like this? The only way to know is to try it out for yourselves. Measure real reactions to direct response media with emotion analytics.

Learn more about Project Look