Like any other country, in Belgium there are regulations on commercial advertising.

Commercial advertising is largely regulated by the Belgian Federal Act on Market Practices and Consumer Protection of 6 April 2010. This Act stipulates that the use of editorial content in the media, for which the advertiser has paid, to advertise a product, when this is not made clear to the consumer, constitutes illegal misleading advertising. Other legislation and regulation on commercial advertising in the media almost exclusively focuses on the audiovisual media. (source: http://tinyurl.com/na9z73s)

When we performed a commercial break in a real theatre piece, we met with all rules and regulations.

With an online film, we reached out to Belgian advertisers and presented them with the idea to act out a live theatre version of one of their TV-commercials, and in doing so reaching an audience in a completely new way.

Lots of Belgium’s biggest advertisers were interested, and we selected 7 of them, including 4 clients from other agencies:

A bank. A public transport company. An energy provider. A tour operator. A water brand. A cookie brand. And a car brand.

On March 6th, during one of their performances, the actors from the TAS played their TV commercials for a live audience, all paid by the advertisers.

With one commercial break, Theater at the Stream won 25% of their lost funds back.

Not only advertisers got an unexpected medium to get their story told, also Theater at the Stream itself got a chance to get their story told, resulting in more than 1,5 million in earned media. (quite a lot for a country with 10 million inhabitants.)

As a result, the discussion about public funding was reopened, both on social media ànd by politicians.

And most importantly: thanks to our campaign the government re-examined their culture budget, and gave the TAS their grants and their future back.