We've all been there. It's late at night, sleep isn't coming and there's nothing on TV except for infomercials. Most of them are too lame to be entertaining but not boring enough to do the job those sheep you've been counting failed to do. And then, like some kind of surreal blessing, you stumble upon a disembodied pair of hands trying to sell you decorative knives with more enthusiasm than a doctor selling a cure for the common cold. You have found Cutlery Corner, known in popular parlance as The Knife Show. It is perhaps the most ingenious example of marketing in the modern world.

Cutlery Corner is the bizarre brain child of knife distributor Jim Frost and intense pitch man Tom O'Dell. About eight years ago, Frost decided to take his knife-selling business to the late night airwaves where today he makes a mint shilling a wide variety of cheap, often laughably small knives that probably cost more to ship than to actually make. The glory of Cutlery Corner is that it doesn't really matter how pointless or silly its products are. The real reason anyone ever buys anything from the show is because of Tom O'Dell. See, O'Dell spends the entire show, which runs on some sort of disorienting one-hour loop, shouting incessantly. It's not exactly a Billy Mays shout. Mays, may his eternally jazzed soul rest in peace, perfected a marketing shout that suggested the guy was genuinely excited about the products he was selling. Tom O'Dell creates an experience that's more like having a redneck yell at you until you agree to buy whatever he has in his hands at the time.

This may seem like a terrible marketing tactic but it definitely works. O'Dell's constant shouting is hypnotic. People just aren't used to being yelled at for a full hour. A few minutes, maybe, but not an hour. It doesn't take long for the shouting to go from unsettling to annoying and from annoying to funny. There it stays for a long time until you just stop noticing it. In fact, life seems strange without the shouting after the first twenty minutes or so.

The lesson of Tom O'Dell's yell-based marketing approach is that it doesn't matter if the customer doesn't like or even respect the pitch man. All that matters is that the customer remembers him. I'm sure Cutlery Corner has made a fair amount of money based solely on those who purchase weird pocket knives just because they find Tom O'Dell entertaining. It only makes sense, especially in today's Internet-fueled, ironic laugh society. This is how infomercial marketing is going to survive in the era of Youtube. People aren't buying the Slap Chop because they actually want the device, they're buying it because Vince Offer had the prescient gall to start talking about his nuts in the commercial.