Belgians like to take a lot of breaks at home. Thanks to digital TV, for example, they pause the live, recorded or on demand content on their screen whenever they want and start watching it again whenever they want. All they have to do is press the pause button on their remote and their TV show freezes. On this exact moment, we wanted viewers to see amusing Royco ads instead of a boring frozen image of the content they're watching. But the technology to do this didn’t exist yet. So we decided to create it ourselves and together with the Production company we transformed the "freeze-screen" into a whole new ad medium. Every time a viewer pressed the pause button on his/her remote, one of Royco’s funny pause ads appeared celebrating the viewer's break.

Normally, when Belgian TV viewers pause their live, recorded or on demand content, they get to see a frozen image of that content provided with a big pause icon in the middle. Thanks to the Royco Breakvertising system the technicians of the production company built for us, every Belgian viewer now got to see a fullscreen Royco ad, supporting them in taking a break. In the beginning of november 2015, we tested the first stage, where we applied the Breakvertising ads to 100.000 digiboxes in Belgium. After the first positive results, we launched it nationwide. Using captured data of the show viewed and the viewers themselves ads can now even be targeted.

Well-received by 97.5% of Belgian TV viewers, partly due to the non-intrusive approach.

Weekly reach of 250.000 unique homes / ad

More than 650.000 weekly views / ad

Hot topic in national and international press

Digital TV brought drastic change in what, when and how we watch TV. But the classic advertising model on TV remained the same.

With Breakvertising we redefined the role of advertising in people’s more personalized lives. The campaign changed TV advertising for good going from interruptive commercial breaks to relevant and “consumer-triggered” communication on TV.

Almost all brands have a specific brand universe, but few of them are capable of translating that universe into a specific medium in a relevant way. Our innovation has now even evolved to a relevant and non-intrusive media platform.

Royco is market leader in the instant soup market. And we decided that our most important competitors are not other soups but snacks. So we had to differentiate ourselves in a very competitive snack market.

Almost all snacks are ready for immediate consumption, just tear down the packaging and start eating. But if you want a Royco, you have to the kitchen, boil water, wait,… We turned this ‘negative’ element (time consuming) into our advantage because it’s the only snack where you need a real break.

Our brain needs breaks to perform. But in our fast and busy world we are always connected. This has a great impact on society. Burn outs and depressions are one of the fastest growing diseases in Belgium with a spectacular growth of 60% in only 5 years’ time. Time for a brand to climb on the barricades and make taking breaks important again.

The last years, on demand viewing caused a major shift in how Belgians watch TV but it didn’t really have the same effect on how Belgian brands use digital TV to communicate to viewers. Despite it being an ever-evolving and smart technological device, digiboxes and their potential are not yet challenged by our marketeers or advertisers, as most of them are still traditional thinkers when it comes to TV. Even when commercials no longer have an insured amount of viewing rates. New players like Netflix as well as replay & ad skipping features created a television landscape in which we ourselves as viewers decide when and why we take a break from our content. Not longer controlled or directed by commercial breaks and the brands that bring them to you. But instead of seeing this as a restriction, we took it as a starting point.