The celebrity-charged atmosphere was electric. The participants were buzzing in tuxedos and designer gowns. Flashbulbs were popping as winners shed tears of joy and losers buried their pain behind practiced smiles.

Was it the Oscars? The Emmys? Maybe the People's Choice Awards?

It was, in fact, the 12th Annual Electronic Retailing Association Conference and Exposition last month in Las Vegas.

But you can think of it as the Grand Hucksters' Ball.

And it was a self-congratulatory triumph for the 3,000 attendees involved in producing "direct response" TV shows _ the program-length ads popularly known as infomercials that peddle everything from kitchen gizmos to real-estate gambits.

"The industry is hot," said association president and CEO Lisa Myers, which is what you might expect someone in her position to say.

But it could be an understatement.

Just check out the $125 billion industry's latest market research as reported by Leisure Trends Group of Boulder, Colo.:

_In 2002 nearly two-thirds of Americans 16 and older will have seen a direct-response television ad, translating to 136.2 million viewers.

_One in four American viewers say that they have purchased an infomercial product, most often by calling a toll-free 800 number to order.

_Viewers are more likely to trust infomercials than Congress, used car salesmen and corporate executives.

In other words, a lot of people are watching infomercials the way that others watch TV shows. And not only in the wee hours.

"It shows what happens in a 500-channel universe," said Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School, where he is director of the Center for Entertainment Studies. "There's a scarcity of programming, so channels need stuff to fill them. Going dark is the one unforgivable sin. And infomercials meet that need."

How is it that the infomercial industry is bigger than ever, especially in a down economy?

Analysts say that TV time for infomercial advertisers is more affordable than it was during the bull stock market, when numerous companies flush with profits led to an increase in advertising rates.

And there's certainly more air time available compared to 1984, when the first infomercials appeared after the federal government deregulated the amount of advertising that TV stations could accept.

But infomercials do more than sell. They're a surrogate.

"These infomercials have hosts who tap into a kind of epidemic of loneliness in our country," he said. "They're as much our imaginary friends as the people who are on soap operas. You get to know who they are.

"Victoria Principal has a bunch of friends come over and they sit with her and you can imagine being invited over to her place. So when you're buying the product, you're not just getting makeup that will make you look like her friends, you are participating in her glamorous life _ just as Oprah's Book Club made people feel that they were friends of Oprah's."

The public's fascination with program-length TV ads isn't lost on celebrities who view infomercial work as a viable career opportunity. Famous names who attended last month's infomercial industry shindig in Las Vegas included Paul Rodriguez, Vanessa Williams, Lindsay Wagner, Hunter Tylo, Jennifer O'Neill, Fred Williamson, Jack LaLanne, Gary Collins and Mary Ann Mobley.

"More celebrities are getting involved now because they get a piece of the pie," said actress Nancy Barnes. She appeared as the "call to action host" in four Phillips-Magnavox Web TV infomercials in the late 1990s. "They (stars) actually get a piece of the back end of the product, so they make so much money doing these things.

"Those of us who get hired to be a spokesperson and are not attached to the product, it's just a buyout, usually. I made about $20,000 per infomercial I shot for Web TV. That's not chicken feed. That's pretty sweet for a day of work."

Electronic Retailing Association president Myers added: "There are celebrities _ I won't name them _ who say that they'll make more in a half-hour of direct response television than they'll make in an entire year on a sitcom."

Still, Barnes thought twice before accepting her first infomercial gig for Web TV, wondering if it might harm her credibility as a stage and screen actress. She found the experience to be "classier" and "more respectable" than she had imagined.

"A lot of infomercials are doing a softer sell now," she said. "It's just a lot slicker and sexier. They're being done better and that makes them more palatable."

In fact, an infomercial can be its own purchasable entertainment product. That was the case last year when the program-length ad for "The Johnny Carson Collection," a video series featuring amusing highlights of Carson as host of "The Tonight Show," became so popular with viewers that it was successfully packaged as a video for $5.99.

None of this surprises media scholar Stuart Ewen, who teaches history, sociology and film and media studies at City University of New York.

"We live in a society where the borders between what is entertainment and what is advertising, between what is news and what is advertising, have become very blurred," he said.

"Large numbers of viewers live in a world where every moment of human attention has been turned into an opportunity for a sales pitch. So there's nothing so shocking to them about turning on the tube and seeing an entertaining portrayal of some gadget that can tighten your thighs, improve your sex life, get rid of your baldness, do all kinds of magical things in the kitchen. It's sort of like the Internet _ it's a very easy, often middle of the night impulse purchase."

And it's "disastrous," Ewen said, "because what it means is we live in a culture where the cash nexus has become indistinguishable from the culture itself."

But Ewen doesn't want to put too much blame on infomercials. Far from it. He's hardly surprised that market research indicates that people trust infomercials more than Congress.

"They see Congress as a group of cowardly hucksters, people who are functioning on behalf of commercialism themselves, most of whom were bought and paid for by businesses.

"At least at the end of your 800 call you get a mince-a-matic in the mail. What do you get from your congressman?"

Kaplan agrees that the barriers are breaking down between advertising and entertainment, but it has been happening for a while.

"It's quite possible," he said, "that the guy going through ancient Greece selling something which sliced and diced vegetables attracted as many people as the guy reciting Homer.

"Infomercials may coarsen the culture, but we live in a system in which the market determines everything. And as long as people watch these things and order from them, they'll continue.

"The upside of that is that the people with the dollars and the eyeballs are in charge. It's not the programmers. It's the consumers."