I recently spoke to the inventor of Magic Jack, the device for turning your regular phone into a VOIP phone that promises you'll "never pay a monthly phone bill again." He said the product is a major winner. In fact, he said, "This will go down as the best DRTV product ever."
Here's what I wrote about the Magic Jack when I reviewed it in January:
It’s a tough sell on DRTV. As a lead-gen campaign, it could work (provided they fixed the confusing offer, which mentions three different price points). As a pure-play DRTV campaign, it will likely fail. That’s because the DRTV buyer is older, less tech savvy and less trusting of new technologies in general.
So was I wrong? We'll see. This week, the Magic Jack long-form show is #18 on the Jordan Whitney "Top Infomercials" chart and #9 on the IMS "Infomercial Rankings." Meanwhile, the short-form spot is #18 on the IMS "Spot Ranking." (It does not appear on the Jordan Whitney Top 60 short-form list this week.) That's pretty impressive. Much better than I expected, to be honest.
But if it's as big as the inventor says, we should expect to see it take the top spots away from the likes of Guthy-Renker's Principal Secret or Euro Pro's Shark Steam Mop on the infomercial charts, and BodyRev's Perfect Pushup or Telebrands' Ped Egg on the short-form charts.