2-1/2 Hours, 107 Commercials.

As the month of May comes to an end, so too do many of our favorite television shows. May is the month for season finales and while a lot of the finales are DVR’d, many die-hard fans are watching them live.

If you found yourself watching the two-and-a-half hour season finale of “Lost” you may have felt a bit of commercial overload.  That’s because there were more than 45 minutes of advertisements during this finale. Entertainment Weekly estimates that 107 spots aired during the “Lost” finale, twice as many as you would normally see during a two-and-a-half hour period.

A recent Advertising Age article reports that a 30-second spot for the “Lost” finale was upwards of $900,000, up 400% since last year’s upfront.  The costliest program for the 2009-2010 TV season was NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” where a 30-second spot cost an average of $339,700.

At $900,000 a crack, you better have some pretty compelling creative. The three Lost-themed ads created for Target integrated well with the program and may have even caught some DVR-fast-forwarders rewinding. 
This particular ad displayed a shot of Lost’s “smoke monster” character and closed out the commercial with sale details for a smoke detector.

The other two Lost themed ads for Target can be viewed here.