The infomercial is easy to dismiss as late night filler, but it began as a discovery about dead airtime. In 1949, a 30-minute pitch for the Vitamix blender aired after midnight on WOR-TV in New York and drew more than 130 telephone orders within an hour. The FCC soon capped commercial minutes per hour, and marketers spent the 1970s hunting for loopholes, from album ads padded with long song clips to a station in Tijuana, Mexico, whose signal covered San Diego. When the limits were lifted for television in 1984, overnight hours that stations once spent off the air became prime real estate.

This episode traces how direct response marketers turned those hours into an industry measured by cost per acquisition, why the bonus offer overrides a buyer’s hesitation, and how the format spread to computer makers, televangelists, and politicians. It also covers the regulators who pushed back, the research showing these purchases are often planned, and the comedians who made the genre a target.

• Singer Peter Lemongello sold over 1.8 million copies of his album Love 76 through long television ads that counted his singing as entertainment.
• In 1985 Ray Lindstrom and a partner bought 2,700 hours of cable time for $8 million and generated $21 million in sales.
• In 2009 Fox replaced its Saturday morning children’s block with paid programming called Weekend Marketplace.
• A week before the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s campaign aired a 30-minute program simultaneously on seven networks and drew over 33 million viewers.
• The United Kingdom banned advertisement magazines in 1963 and did not allow paid long-form ads on television until 2009.