Infomercials are Amazing

Okay, we realize that the Snuggie has often been the subject of our posts. But we feel an obligation to relate mainstream media mentions of infomercial products, and “Funny Business” by Rob Walker in the March 10th NY Times Magazine caught our attention.

Accompanied by a photo of the Statue of Liberty wearing a superimposed red Snuggie, Walker’s piece tries to answer the all-too-common question about the Snuggie’s monumental ($60 million+) success: Why this item? And why now?

He mentions and dismisses the two most common theories:

• “One theory is that the Snuggie has caught on because it’s comforting — as if, in these recessionary times, we have become a nation of Linuses.” A funny concept, surely, but “the cowering-at-home explanation is undercut” by the proliferation of the Snuggie Pub Crawl.
• The second theory, of course, deals with the newly open daytime and primetime commercial slots: more people see the commercial, and more people buy the product. To this, Walker responds: “This factor is hard to dispute, but it cannot, by itself, explain why this specific bit of ‘As Seen on TV’ flotsam has attracted so much interest.” Exactly. It answers “Why now?” but not “Why this particular product?”

Walker gets to his point: it is the absurdity of the Snuggie and its ads that makes it so successful. We couldn’t agree more, and we love his phraseology so much that he gets a block quote (emphasis added by us):

Probably the crucial factor isn’t the frequency of Snuggie ads but rather their spectacular absurdity — the woman who finds it difficult to answer the phone if she’s under a blanket, the Snuggie-wearing family roasting marshmallows or attending a game, the disturbingly sedentary man with a remote control, a newspaper and a bowl of popcorn. The idea seems to be that if the product is goofy, it ought to be pitched in the most ridiculous manner imaginable. Don’t turn into camp; create camp. The upshot is something like the Pet Rock of the Depression 2.0 era.

If slumpy economic stretches have included silly fads before, this may be the first time it has happened in the era of the mainstream Web, where Snuggie advertising inspired an immediate wave of YouTube parodies and jokey Facebook groups. These propelled the product onto the radar of talk-show monologists and otherwise-serious news organizations, all of whom played the thing for laughs. “There is a bit of the ridiculous to it,” allows Scott Boilen, president of Allstar Products, which makes the Snuggie as well as Bendaroos and Strap Perfect (the Ultimate Bra Strap Solution!), among other things. “So that catches people’s attention.” But he also says that he doesn’t mind the laughter, since sales suggest the message is getting through anyway. (Indeed, while watching one particularly merciless parody, I was startled when YouTube served up a pop-over ad link for the actual Snuggie — a weird case of a brand sponsoring its own satirist.) And of course he maintains that there is in fact a real and nonjokey message: “If you think about it, why wouldn’t a blanket have sleeves?”

How meta is that? A Snuggie ad superimposed over a parody of a Snuggie ad? Beautiful. The Snuggie has officially transcended into the realm of the Infomercial Icon.