Collecting, the Couch-Potato Way
Many video collectors who don’t want to bother going to stores can do it the couch-potato way--buying through television ads.
After watching a preview of a movie or a documentary, they call the phone number that’s flashing throughout the ad and pay by credit card.
You’d think many companies would use this method, but only a handful do. “Selling through TV is expensive because of the cost of making the ads and buying TV time,” said Candice Carpenter, president of Time-Life Video & Television, the heaviest user of TV ads. “That keeps companies out of this market.”
But Time-Life Video & Television, a sister division of Time-Life Books, has the resources and can afford to wait while the returns trickle in. It has stockpiled about 700 titles, including movies--featuring stars such as Clint Eastwood and John Wayne--documentaries and cartoons. Its most prominent documentary is the noted PBS series “The Civil War.”
The titles are sold individually, for $20-$24, or in sets that range from $39 to $179 (for the nine-cassette “Civil War”).
The target audience, Carpenter said, is consumers in their 30s and 40s: “A lot of people in that age group like to buy things the easy way--without leaving home.”
Research is a key factor in selecting which titles to market. “We don’t just market on hunches,” Carpenter explained. “We try to find out what might go over well with the target audience. We’ve found out that the family-oriented titles are best for this market--the kind of titles families can watch together. The movies tend to be action-adventure and the documentaries about subjects like nature and aviation.”
The approach is paying off. The company is anticipating revenues this year of $55 million, up from 1990’s $36 million and a big jump from first-year (1988) revenues of $4 million. TV ads account for 40%-50% of those totals, Carpenter said; the rest comes from other direct-response campaigns, such as mail and telephone sales.
Time-Life’s strategy stresses packaging and better quality tapes than the consumer would get by taping off TV.
“Many people are too lazy to tape off of TV or don’t know how,” Carpenter explained. “Though you can buy all these movies in stores, you probably wouldn’t find them all in one store and you wouldn’t find them in a fancy package. Most people wouldn’t go from store to store picking up one here and one there. But if they see them all in a package on TV, they might reach for the phone and order a set.”
Time-Life’s upcoming sets include a Jack Nicholson package--five movies, including “Batman” and “Chinatown”--for $100, and “Land of the Eagles,” a PBS historical series about the discovery and exploration of America. It is scheduled for a November telecast on PBS but will be available earlier on cassette for $159.
Time-Life also was selling “The Civil War” before it was broadcast. Carpenter said that of the 105,000 sets sold, 25,000 were purchased before the telecast.
