From the inside out

John Larson Correspondent

Want clear skin? A fresh new look? Want to lose weight? Or get strong? Then somewhere, there’s an infomercial airing just for you. 

The infomercial industry is booming, enjoying $91 billion dollars a year in sales, offering safe, reliable products, and making household names of super pitchmen who offer you products to buy from the comfort of your own home.

But despite offering thousands of reputable products, the industry does have it blemishes. The Federal Trade Commission has launched an on-going crackdown targeting ads after the FTC found deceptive weight loss ads running ‘rampant’ and more than half of all weight loss ads studied contained at least one false claim.

And then there’s Kevin Trudeau, leader of what the FTC calls an “infomercial empire that’s misled Americans for years.” After an ad aired for a product called Coral Calcium Supreme, which claimed to cure everything from cancer to heart disease. The FTC banned Trudeau from infomercials for life. But thanks to a loophole in the settlement, within months, Trudeau was back on the air, hawking his book, which became a national best seller.

Greg Renker, infomercial industry pioneer: 10 percent of your marketers are serial offenders, television terrorists, I call them!

Greg Renker has produced some of the most successful infomercials of all time. He says his company has annual sales of one billion dollars. While Guthy-Renker has not been without controversy— years ago consumers even complained about one of its products here on Dateline— Renker is considered a leader in the industry. His company has no record of any FTC fines or actions. And Renker is worried about what he calls “renegades” in his industry.

Renker: They seem to be comfortable taking advantage of consumers, selling them bogus products, and running to the bank.

John Larson, Dateline correspondent: Do they get caught? From your experience, do the bad guys pay?

Renker: In our experience, the bad guys don’t pay enough. And sometimes they don’t pay at all. It’s embarrassing to be in an industry that works so hard to put out good products, to deal with competitors who don’t follow any guidelines and they take the money and run.

All this raises questions: if someone wants to rip you off with the help of an infomercial, who is going to stop them? Dateline has learned that while the federal government has essentially doubled its efforts to stop false and misleading infomercial claims in recent years, the FTC still only brings an average of five cases a year. That, in an industry that releases as many as two new infomercials a day; more than 700 year. There are those inside the industry warning that the FTC’s efforts are not enough.

On Friday night, we bring you a Dateline hidden camera investigation takes you behind the scenes to show you an infomercial for a product that should never be sold.

From meetings on how to get a genuine expert to endorse a product with no science behind it, to a doctor who ought to know better, to consumers who swear by the products, but may not be consumers at all!

How did we get such an inside look at how infomercials are made? Well, it occurred to us that to find out how a fake product might make its way to the marketplace, you’d almost have follow a marketer trying to sell a product with little more than exaggerated claims and empty promises. And to do that, you’d almost have to go into the infomercial business, yourselves.  So that’s precisely what Dateline did.

The 'company' and its 'product'
We began in Oregon, in a small town nestled near the California border, home to a small company called Johnston Products.

Meet Dirk Johnston (that’s not his real name): He’s a Dateline producer, playing the part of the front man for our company.

And there’s another catch: The company is a phantom, a figment of Dateline’s imagination, created by NBC News for just one purpose: to go inside the world of infomercials.

Then we came up with an idea for a product — a pill — that could not possibly work as advertised: a skin moisturizer that would claim to take your lines and wrinkles away. We decided we needed a secret ingredient for our pill. So we went shopping.

We took what we’d bought to NBC where the prop department began filling our product with the secret ingredient.

What was it? Nestle Quik.

Normally, if you wanted to sell a legitimate product, you might next put the product through rigorous scientific testing to make sure it was safe and effective — but Dateline did the opposite. We took it to a doctor to make sure it was safe and ineffective. We know, for example, of claims that cocoa butter, when rubbed onto the body, softens the skin. So we wanted to make sure that with our pill, we had not accidentally stumbled upon a magic skin moisturizer.

We showed it to Dr. Zoe Draelos, a clinical associate professor at Wake Forest University, and a nationally recognized skin expert.

Dr. Zoe Draelos, a clinical associate professor: Two gel caps of Nestle’s Quik might satisfy your chocolate craving but would do absolutely nothing to moisturize the skin.

So we had a product— a skin moisturizer we knew could not possibly work. Now all we needed was a name. Something catchy. 

Introducing… Moisturol.

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