• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 13, 2007

Listen up, late-night network hosts: now tell quicker jokes, perhaps with a product placement as part of the comic story.

Meanwhile viewers should start complaining, because now a bunch of commercials will interrupt the usual relatively commercial-free first half hour of your favorite late-night network talk show.

Jokes in those monologues that need a lot time to develop will now need to be rewritten. CBS has already been experimenting in running early-in-the-show commercials this summer during "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" -- all because of the coming commercial ratings, which are replacing program ratings as the main currency for TV advertising deals.

Good news: David Letterman typically has only has about three bits in his short monologue. That means early commercials - like those for young-skewing products, theatrical movies, videos, and mobile phone companies -- can be easily squeezed into the early part of his show. The same can't be said for NBC's Jay Leno, who seems to have an extra-long initial monologue -- seven or eight bits for his intro.

Because viewership is higher earlier in the evening, commercials -- now subject to commercial ratings -- will run earlier.

And so now Ferguson puts the onus totally on the commercials - as if those messages have little to do with what used to be important. "Thank God the programs won't get rated," he joked.

Media buying executives also want commercials to run sooner on early-morning news shows, which typically don't have many commercials during that first hour.

With these shows, network programmers worked on the assumption of the big tease: Give viewers lots of what they want early. Once you have drawn them in, sprinkle in more commercials. The hope is that viewers will make it to the finish.

But it doesn't work that way; viewers take small bites and move on.

Perhaps the best compromise might be for late-night comedians to offer up a bit of branded entertainment inside their funny bits.

That's if advertisers can take a joke.