By David Bauder, Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --The cosmetics firm Avon will come calling on TV, recruiting sales representatives with its first-ever infomercial debuting this weekend.
After its initial appearance on Oxygen on Saturday morning, the half-hour commercial for troubled Avon Products Inc. will be shown repeatedly on Oxygen, Lifetime and USA.
Deborah Norville and financial guru Suze Orman are featured, but the infomercial is dominated by testimonials from women who sell Avon’s products. The company wants to increase its base of 500,000 sales representatives in the United States.
“We saw it as an opportunity because of the times we’re in,” said Geralyn Brieg, president of Avon North America.
Avon announced a restructuring with a freeze on salaries and hiring two months ago. The company sells more than three-quarters of its cosmetics overseas, where sales have been hurt by a stronger dollar.
The project is also an example of the growing acceptance of i nfomercials, once an advertising form reserved for cheesy products.
“We really wanted to explore how to do it in a quality way,” Brieg said, “and I think the image of infomercials as being something of a hard sell is really outdated.”
Brieg said the company was motivated to do something more on television after an appearance by its president on ABC’s “Good Morning America” last November. The TV appearance alone caused a large jump in the number of people calling to inquire about selling Avon products, she said.
She would not pinpoint a target on how many new sales representatives Avon hopes to gain with the infomercial.
“Recruiting is 50 percent of what we focus on at Avon,” she said. “It’s the moral equivalent for a retailer of having more stores open.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More