When is a commercial break not really a break? When it’s a creative break. Creative breaks are a new integration technique being used by Radio-Canada to bring advertising into programs without the usual product placement approaches.

The French-language broadcaster plans to build on this concept and develop new ones going into this fall. One of its new tactics is long-form advertising, something it has just begun with a few clients who want to own the full two minutes of a commercial break. As a result, two-minute features are being created to run exclusively on R-C stations.

Additionally, the Radio-Canada Web site – once an ad-free zone – is going commercial this fall, offering standalone and integrated advertising that carries over from TV to the online platform.

Advertisers are finding creative breaks to be an attractive product, says Jerome Leys, director of sales for Radio-Canada in Toronto, because it enables program integration without the high cost of typical sponsorship.

Leys explains that Radio-Canada developed the idea after studying what broadcasters outside of North America were doing to counter commercial avoidance and provide added value for advertisers. The result, he says, are creative breaks within a program that really don’t affect or stop the programming at all.

R-C takes 30-seconds from the 12 ad-minutes-per-hour allowed by the CRTC and isolates it in showcase areas on the schedule. The tactic is being used within a show as well as between programs.

On top-rated shows, Leys says the breaks have been isolated in a countdown format. ‘Between the end of a program and before another, you would see the title of the show and a clock counting down from 30 seconds to the start of [it] with a commercial inserted into the countdown screen.’

The insertions in game shows are handled a bit differently. While a contestant is thinking of the answer to the question, there’s a clock counting down 15 or 20 seconds. A commercial runs in the countdown frame before returning to the show and the answer.

Leys says that by doing it this way, the spots are not only integrated into programming but viewers are also aware they don’t have a lot of time to wait or to channel surf.

Another advantage, he says, is that because the break comes out of the regular allotment of commercial minutes, normal commercial breaks are much shorter and therefore less likely to invoke channel hopping.