The Best Infomercials of All Time: 20 Classics That Made History

The best infomercials of all time did three things at once: they sold a product, they made a pitchman famous, and they left a line or a demo that people still repeat decades later. This ranking covers 20 of them, from the 1978 Ginsu knife spot to Phil Swift sawing a boat in half for Flex Tape. Sales figures come from company releases, SEC filings, news coverage and sourced reference entries, and where sources disagree, both numbers are shown.

How This Ranking Was Built

Nobody publishes audited sales for most direct-response products, so no list like this can be a pure sales chart. The order here is an editorial judgment based on three things anyone can check:

1. Documented results. Units or revenue reported by the company, a court or SEC filing, or a named news outlet. Self-reported company numbers are labeled as such.
2. Staying power. How long the campaign ran and whether the product is still sold.
3. Cultural reach. Whether the catchphrase, the demo, or the pitchman outlived the ad itself.

Two famous names were left off on purpose. The Pet Rock sold nearly 1.5 million units in its 1975 run, but it moved through retail stores after a San Francisco trade show, not through TV ads. Barack Obama’s 2008 half-hour reportedly drew more than 33 million viewers, the most-watched paid program in U.S. television history, but it sold a candidate rather than a product. For the format itself, see our guide to what an infomercial is.

The 20 Best Infomercials of All Time, Ranked

The table gives the quick version. Details and sources for each pick follow below it.

Ranks 11 to 20 are P90X, The Clapper, ShamWow, Slap Chop, the Magic Bullet, Tae Bo, Bowflex, Flex Seal and Flex Tape, NordicTrack, and Time-Life’s Sounds of the Seventies.

1. Ginsu Knives (1978)

This is the template every later pitch copied. Barry Becher and Ed Valenti of Dial Media debuted a two-minute spot in 1978 with copy by Arthur Schiff: a man in a karate gi chops a board but can’t cut a tomato, then the knife slices a tomato paper thin and goes on to tin cans and frozen food. The price was $9.95, followed by “There’s more,” a stack of free steak knives and gadgets, and a 50-year guarantee. Mental Floss reports $30 million in knife sales from 1978 through 1985, and Wikipedia puts the total at two to three million sets. Note that it was a short spot, not a half-hour show. The long format came later.

2. Ronco Showtime Rotisserie (1998)

Ron Popeil had been demonstrating kitchen gadgets on TV since 1956, when he showed off his father Samuel’s Chop-O-Matic, a $3.98 hand chopper that sold more than two million units. The Pocket Fisherman and other Ronco products followed. His peak came in 1998 with the Showtime Rotisserie and its line “Set it and forget it!” Encyclopedia.com’s Ronco history reports about 2.5 million units and roughly $400 million in sales by mid-2001, while Wikipedia gives a lifetime figure above eight million in the U.S. Popeil sold Ronco in 2005 and died in July 2021 at 86. The man and the line are covered in our pages on famous infomercial pitchmen and iconic infomercial catchphrases.

3. George Foreman Grill

The George Foreman Grill is the strongest candidate for best-selling infomercial product ever. Salton made the sloped, fat-draining kitchen grill, and Foreman received a sample in 1994. Wikipedia counts more than 100 million units sold, and Salton paid Foreman and two partners a reported $137.5 million in 1999 for permanent rights to his name. Foreman, who died in March 2025, told AARP his total earnings from the grill topped $200 million.

4. OxiClean With Billy Mays

Billy Mays became the loud, bearded face of OxiClean around 2000, and his shouted demos made it one of the most recognizable cleaners in America. In July 2006, Church & Dwight agreed to pay $325 million in cash for Orange Glo International, the brand’s owner. Mays died in June 2009, at 50.

5. Proactiv

Dermatologists Katie Rodan and Kathy Fields created Proactiv, and Guthy-Renker put its first infomercial on the air in October 1995. The spots rotated celebrity users, among them Judith Light, Vanessa Williams, Jessica Simpson, and Justin Bieber, so the ad never felt stale. Wikipedia reports sales of $800 million a year as of 2010.

6. ThighMaster

Suzanne Somers’s ThighMaster spots debuted in April 1991. She squeezed the toner on camera while talking calmly to the viewer, a style that made the workout look simple and was the opposite of the shouting kitchen pitch. Marketer Peter Bieler of Ovation has said about 6 million units sold within 18 months, and Somers later estimated 10 to 15 million in total.

7. Snuggie

Allstar Marketing Group launched the Snuggie, a fleece blanket with sleeves for people who want their hands free, in late 2008. The spot was earnest and the idea looked silly, and that mix turned it into a running joke that kept selling. Allstar’s own 2010 press release claimed 20 million sold in under two years. In 2017 the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that a Snuggie is a blanket, not something you wear like a robe.

8. Total Gym

Tom Campanaro came up with the Total Gym design in 1974, but it became a household name after a 1996 deal with American Telecast Products put Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley on an incline bench in a long-form show. Wikipedia puts sales above 4 million units. The company’s own site claims more than 5 million.

9. Hair Club for Men

Hair Club for Men founder Sy Sperling closed his ads with “I’m not only the Hair Club president, but I’m also a client,” the wording CBS News and NBC News quoted in his obituaries. CBS reported that of the first two spots shot in 1982, the one without him barely drew calls, while the one featuring Sperling brought in about 2,000. Few ads show more clearly why the founder in front of the camera mattered.

10. Tony Robbins, Personal Power

Personal Power sold motivational tapes, not a gadget. Bill Guthy and Greg Renker built their company around it in 1988, and a Guthy-Renker company history estimates that 100 million Americans had seen Robbins’s shows by 1991. It proved that a strong host could sell an idea on television with nothing to slice or squeeze.

11. P90X

Tony Horton’s P90X launched in 2004 according to Beachbody’s own P90X3 press release (Wikipedia says 2005). The before-and-after photos did the selling. BODi, the company’s current name, says more than 11 million copies have sold, a company-reported figure.

12. The Clapper

Joseph Enterprises put The Clapper on TV in the mid-1980s with a jingle, “Clap on! Clap off!”, that people recognize from the audio alone. It is a sound-activated switch for a lamp or TV, and it is still sold today.

13. ShamWow

Vince Offer began selling the ShamWow absorbent cloth in 2006 after seeing similar towels at flea markets, then shot the famous spot in the summer of 2007 for about $20,000. His fast, slightly menacing delivery made the ad fun to quote, and he says he has sold millions of towels. No independent total exists.

14. Slap Chop

Offer’s follow-up was filmed in August 2008 and aired that December. In April 2009, DJ Steve Porter posted an Auto-Tune “Slap Chop Rap” remix to YouTube, and it built a cult following that summer. That remix is an early case of the internet turning an ad into free airtime.

15. Magic Bullet

Homeland Housewares introduced the Magic Bullet blender in October 2003. Its half-hour show staged a morning-after gathering in which hosts “Mick” and “Mimi” made smoothies, omelets and dips for houseguests “in 10 seconds or less.” According to Wikipedia, it brought in $250 million in its first 17 months.

16. Tae Bo

Billy Blanks developed Tae Bo in 1976, a mix of martial arts, boxing and dance, and frequent TV ads made the videos a craze in the late 1990s. By 1999, according to Wikipedia, an estimated 1.5 million sets had sold.

17. Bowflex

The Bowflex 2000X went on sale in 1986, using flexible polymer rods instead of weight plates. The company grew so large that it later bought Nautilus, Schwinn Fitness and StairMaster. After weak post-pandemic sales, it filed for Chapter 11 in March 2024 and was bought by Johnson Health Tech for $37.5 million.

18. Flex Seal and Flex Tape

Phil Swift’s Swift Response, a family-owned company in Weston, Florida, launched Flex Seal in 2011 and later added Flex Tape, Flex Glue and Flex Shot. The Flex Tape commercial, posted to YouTube in January 2017, gave the internet “I sawed this boat in half!”, and Know Your Meme traces “That’s a lotta damage!” to a Flex Seal bucket demo. Swift became a favorite of meme makers and is the closest thing the 2010s produced to Billy Mays.

19. NordicTrack

Edward and Florence Pauls founded NordicTrack in 1975 and sold the ski machine through magazine ads and VHS demo tapes. After CML bought it in 1986, the company shifted its marketing to infomercials and retail stores. CML later went bankrupt, and in 1998 Icon Health & Fitness bought NordicTrack’s patents and trademarks for $9.5 million. It is a useful reminder that a famous TV pitch doesn’t guarantee a durable business.

20. Time-Life Sounds of the Seventies

Time-Life’s 40-volume Sounds of the Seventies series began in 1989. It was advertised on TV and in magazines and sold by subscription through a 1-800 number, with a new volume arriving about every other month. No sales total has been published, which is why it sits last.

Why These Pitches Worked

Put these ads side by side and the same parts show up again and again. Knowing why each one works says more than the sales numbers do.

• The demo replaces the claim. A knife cutting a can, a towel soaking up a spill, a grill draining fat into a tray. Viewers believe what they see happen on the surface in front of them far more than anything a host says.
• A small, specific problem. A stained shirt, a dull knife, a leaky gutter. The product is the cure, and the problem is common enough that most people watching have it.
• “But wait, there’s more.” The trick behind the bonus stack is timing: it lands after the price is named, so the viewer is weighing a growing pile of stuff against a number that stays fixed.
• The 800 number and a deadline. A toll-free number plus “call in the next 20 minutes” turns interest into a decision to buy before the feeling fades. In a half-hour show, the call to action repeats several times because viewers tune in partway through.
• A face people trust or remember. Popeil, Mays, Somers, Sperling and Swift each became part of the product.

What the totals don’t show is how direct-response TV is judged. Each airing is measured by whether the calls it brings in pay for the airtime, which is why the strongest spots ran for years: once a script paid for itself, the marketer just kept buying time. Brands that couldn’t make that math work disappeared quickly, no matter how good the ad might look. Whether the products hold up is a separate question, covered in do As Seen On TV products work.

How the Long-Form Infomercial Began

The half-hour sales show is older than most people think. In 1949, a filmed Vitamix blender demo ran as a 30-minute program on WOR-TV in New York, and it is credited as the first filmed half-hour infomercial for a product. The format only took off after 1984, when the FCC scrapped its old rules limiting TV commercial time. Stations could now sell whole half-hour blocks, typically filled with a 28:30 show, and by 1994 an estimated 91% of stations had aired them. Our pages on 80s infomercials and 90s infomercials cover those two decades, and our profile of famous infomercial pitchmen covers the hosts.

Honorable Mentions

• Insanity (2009). Beachbody’s no-equipment interval program with Shaun T. NPR reported Beachbody’s figure that his programs combined have sold more than $1 billion worth of videos, but no Insanity-only figure is published.
• Miracle Blade and other knife-ad successors. These knife ads copied the tomato and can demo almost shot for shot. They are memorable, but none has a reliable sales total.
• NutriBullet. The larger follow-up to the Magic Bullet. It became a common kitchen blender, but no reliable launch-era sales figure is available.

To watch the best infomercials of all time in order, start with the 1978 Ginsu spot and the Showtime Rotisserie show, then compare them with a 2017 Flex Tape ad. Look at the cut, the bonus stack and the countdown: none of it has changed. Only the length, the host and where people watch it have.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best infomercials of all time?

Ginsu knives, the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, the George Foreman Grill, OxiClean with Billy Mays, and Proactiv top this list. Each combined documented sales with a demo or catchphrase that is still widely known.

What is the best-selling infomercial product ever?

The George Foreman Grill, with more than 100 million units sold according to Wikipedia. Counted by revenue instead of units, Proactiv’s $800 million a year by 2010 is the largest annual figure on this list, but it is a multi-product skincare line.

Who is the most famous infomercial pitchman?

Ron Popeil and Billy Mays are the two names people mention most. Popeil was on TV from 1956 into the 2000s, and Mays was the face of OxiClean and many other products until his death in 2009.

Do they still make infomercials?

Yes. Direct-response ads still air on TV, and the same scripts now also run as online video ads. Flex Tape is the best-known recent example: its 2017 commercial spread on YouTube and became a meme.

What does DRTV stand for?

DRTV stands for direct-response television, meaning any TV ad that asks the viewer to act right away by calling, texting, or visiting a website. It covers both short spots and 28:30 long-form shows.