A five-second blurb appears on your TV screen after an act break but before a commercial spot. It thematically references the show you're watching while offering a factoid about the product in said spot.

It's not part of the show. And it's not quite an ad. So what is it?

If you're AMC, you might call it "Mad-vertising."

The blurbs are popping up this season as part of the cabler's ring-a-ding-ding period drama, "Mad Men." In one, a title card recalls, "Prescription drugs could not be advertised on television in the United States until 1997" against the signature minimalist backdrop of the skein's opening-credits sequence just before an ad for anti-hypertension medication Caduet. Another informs that "Heineken was the first imported beer in America after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933" then segues into a spot for the Dutch brew.

The method behind this Mad-ness? "We thought if we could almost 'host' commercials with a piece of trivia that was in the 'Mad Men' look, (auds) would look at the commercial differently," says AMC's senior marketing veep Linda Schupack.

Or at all. In addition to being a novel melding of content and commerce -- a sort of trailer for an ad that also plays off the skein's warts-and-all look at the '60s-era ad world -- the blurbs aim to keep DVR users' fingers off the fast-forward button.

That's AMC's "dirty little secret," Schupack concedes. "You're not blowing through the commercial. You're thinking, 'What's going on here?' "

Kind of clever, and kind of Mad-dening.