• by Wayne Friedman , April 1, 2011

After much delay and heightened drama around the show's creator Matt Weiner, AMC's "Mad Men" is coming back in 2012, but with more commercials. What does this mean for advertisers? More opportunity -- but more clutter.

Eleven of the 13 regular-season shows will have two more commercial minutes of ad time per episode -- four 30-second commercials. When asked how much total national advertising commercial minutes will be run in "Mad Men," an AMC spokeswoman declined to comment.

The 4-year-old show's program content will now run 45 minutes per episode for most of the season. A season ago, an average episode was 47 minutes. The 45-minute length shows will run for each of 11 episodes, and the second to 12th, with the season premiere and season finale running for 47 minutes. Weiner expects the show to run for three more seasons.

While the show will make room for more TV marketers that are desperate to get into it, the new arrangement may also cause advertisers some concern.

"The downside for advertisers is that there is more clutter," says Ira Berger, director of national broadcast for the Dallas-based Richards Group, who has bought the show for Bridgestone Tires.

That said, Berger notes the ratio of program content time to commercials is still much better than dramas running on broadcast or cable networks, which can be 42 or 43 minutes long depending on the network or specific series.

Although "Mad Men" ratings aren't the best among cable dramas, Berger says the award-studded show has given AMC the ability to command near broadcast network-like CPMs. According to other media industry estimates, this is around the $34 range on adults 18-49 in prime time and about the same for 25-54 viewers.

The average CPM for a show on AMC -- not "Mad Mad" -- can average $12 to $13, according to media estimates. The good news for AMC's "Mad Men" is that the $34 CPM is much higher than typical cable networks' original dramas, which register in the $25 CPM range for 18-49 viewers, and a greater premium when looking at general prime time cable at $12 to $13 CPMs.

The out-of-the-pocket price -- the unit price for a 30-second commercial spot -- can be around $25,000 to $30,000 in "Mad Men." If this seems low in relation to other dramas, it is because "Mad Men" has low overall ratings. Not just against broadcast dramas, but against other cable dramas. It averages around 2 million viewers per episode.

But as media advertising executives know, that's not the way cable programming gets sold to TV marketers. Big cable programming packages are sold to TV advertisers -- sometimes making it difficult to figure out what is paid for specific airings of shows. For AMC, a big package might include a number of reruns of "Mad Men" and a slew of movies.

Media executive Berger says "Mad Men" does a lot of heavy lifting for AMC's profile: "It pushes up the entire average CPM of the network. On paper, it may look like they are taking a bath, but the show defines the network."