In January 2009 CBS viewers noticed something new. Two minute infomercials for a DVD set, “The World at War” by Time Life began regularly showing up on the prime time Saturday line up. This is a clear indication of just how troubled the broadcast advertising market really is.

“The economy is the number one focus for everyone, and it affects the advertisers and the rates,” says Pat Boos, Senior Vice President, acquisition and marketing at Direct Holdings Americas, which licenses the Time Life brand.

Infomercials prevent dead space. “When someone pulls off the air,” Boos explains, “like a pharmaceutical or medical or sports company, the networks sometimes find themselves with last-minute dead space,” she said. “We can come in and say we’ve got a tape ready, we’ve got the product ready.”

According to Ms. Boos, Time Life is currently running double the number of spots they ran last year. Networks typically try to avoid infomercial advertisers because they pay significantly less than the cost of general advertising.

However, in exchange for such low rates, infomercial advertisers have no say over when their ads will run. Priority is given to full-priced ads, but when they don’t have enough advertisers to fill those slots, they rely on direct-response ads.

Direct-response ads are increasing all over. And it’s not just television filling empty time slots with direct response ads. Radio, print and Internet media buyers are doing it too. The trend is more noticeable in broadcast because networks cannot add or lengthen programming to fill empty spots.

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