by Marco Tepoorten
I didn't notice it right away. The commercial had aired a few days earlier on RSI , and my head was full of other things: meetings, deadlines, matters to be finished, and that familiar feeling of rushing even when you're standing still. Then, without anyone announcing it, small signs begin to arrive. First one, then another, and at a certain point you realize it's not the usual satisfaction of being on the air. It's something different. It's the ad that stops being on television and starts circulating outside: in people's words, in their glances, in the silences, in those sudden compliments you don't expect and that's precisely why they're worth double.
It started almost banally, at the pharmacy. The pharmacist, a down-to-earth guy, not given to casual compliments, looked at me as he usually does, with that quick, matter-of-fact half-smile, and told me he'd seen the commercial. "Beautiful," he added, saying it with a casualness that was unstaged. Then he thought for a moment, as if trying to be precise, and finished with a sentence that stuck with me more than the commercial itself: "It's the best ad I've seen in a long time." At that moment, I had an almost instinctive reaction, one of someone who thanks you and moves on, but as I was leaving, I realized that that kind of compliment carries special weight, because it comes from someone who isn't giving you anything, but is giving you a genuine impression.
In the days that followed, stranger, more subtle episodes came along, ones you can't really describe unless you've experienced them. At the bar, in a shop, on the street, you'd see a look that was longer than usual, as if someone was making a mental connection and hadn't yet decided whether to say it. Sometimes they wouldn't say anything, and it was almost more eloquent that way, because you could sense they'd recognized something: maybe not the name, but the voice, the face, that presence that in a commercial is a risk, because it either exposes you to criticism or makes you credible.
Then, as often happens, someone comes along to break the ambiguity and really stop you. It happened with an almost shy kindness: "Excuse me," and then that sentence that, spoken softly, seems like a personal question: "But you... you're the one from the commercial, right?" At that point I saw the smile and the compliment arrive, direct, without mincing words: "Beautiful, really, it's stuck in my head." On another occasion, the sentence was even more clear: "I haven't seen an ad like that in years." These are words that, if you read them in an email, seem exaggerated; if they say them while looking you in the eye, you understand they're not talking about technique, they're talking about sensation.
It was then that I realized a simple yet crucial detail. That ad didn't ask for anything. There was none of the usual urgency to convince, none of the anxiety of grabbing your attention in ten seconds, none of the hand pushing you toward a pre-written conclusion. It lasted one minute and thirty seconds, which today is almost an act of obstinacy, and it took its time to tell its story. Calmly, without shouting, without forcing, as if the viewer simply needed to listen.
Someone said it to me in the most effective way possible: "Finally, an ad that doesn't take you for a fool." It's a phrase that makes you smile, but it holds enormous truth. Much communication today is born out of the fear of being ignored, and so it accelerates, compresses, simplifies until it becomes an automatic reflex. Here, however, the opposite idea was present: slow down and trust. Trust, in advertising, is almost counterintuitive because it seems like fragility. In reality, it's a form of strength, because it implies that you don't need to command attention: you just need to deserve it.
At that point, inevitably, I started thinking about it as an entrepreneur, and not just as someone who has put themselves out there with a name and a face. Because an ad doesn't live solely on what it says, it also lives on where it's said. The container matters. It matters more than we like to admit when we talk about creativity, language, and format. A message can be well-crafted, but if it doesn't have a home to support it, if it doesn't have a context that makes it credible, it risks slipping away like everything else.
I continue to believe in television, and I say this with conviction. It may seem strange coming from someone who works in logistics and also runs a digitalization and data center company. Yet for me, for better or worse, "TV said it" still matters. Not as a certainty, but as a cultural sensation. Television, especially the kind that's local, has a quality that other channels struggle to replicate: it still manages to create a shared moment, to show the same thing to many people at the same time. And then those people meet on the street, in the pharmacy, at the bar, and tell you. It's a simple, almost ancient, dynamic, but precisely for this reason, so powerful.
It could be said that we were clever to choose a path that bucked the trend. But the deeper lesson, at least for me, is that the message matters as much as the medium it's delivered in. Because it's not enough to have a story to tell; you also need a platform that makes it shareable, a place where a minute and a half doesn't seem extravagant, but a viable choice, and where people can come together, even if only for a moment, in the same story.
That's why that small daily success—the pharmacist, the glances, the people who stop you to say, "But you..."—isn't just a compliment to a well-made commercial. It's also proof that a kind of attention still exists that only comes when the medium, television, has structure, credibility, and continuity. If that structure weakens, not only does a channel disappear, but also the space in which local businesses can speak with weight, calmness, and dignity.
And then, yes, inevitably, many will look elsewhere, not because of fashion, but because the world doesn't wait, and communication, like logistics, follows the flow of people.
Perhaps this is precisely what makes the story of a successful commercial interesting. Not the vanity of the result, but the awareness that there is still a way of communicating that can be heard, provided there is still a suitable venue to host it. Because when a commercial leaves the screen, you understand it in the simplest way: someone stops you, looks at you, and simply says "beautiful," and its conclusion stays with you: "the past that inspires us, the present that engages us, the future that awaits us."
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