ABC Dabbles in Infomercials

One of my favorite news magazines is ABC's 20/20. The stories are excellent and the personalities (John Stossel and Elizabeth Vargas) are among the best in the industry, in my opinion.

On tonight's show the focus was a follow up on a story about Camden, NJ with an emphasis on the positive developments that the city has seen through the eyes of a particular family (sprinkled with many examples of a lack of progress). The story includes a family that lives in a horrible home and receive an Extreme Makeover on the ABC network program. That was followed with an interesting human interest story on a brother sister competing against each other on ABC's Dancing with the Stars.

I don't know about you, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. Tonight's 20/20 was a very interesting and well done infomercial. It was about other ABC programs. It was done in a tasteful and entertaining manner. Believe me, if I didn't like it, I wouldn't have watched it. But one of the program's major objectives was to clearly sell other programming.

That is the future of media: advertising messages intertwined in the content. Most people won't even notice the smart shows that pursue this objective.

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