Back in the 1950s, when TV was live, viewers had a certain sense of excitement when watching the goggle box, knowing, or at least believing, that the unexpected could happen, and sometimes did.

That’s the feeling that Match.com, a dating site, wants to engender in its upcoming TV campaign, a bit of spontaneity, that sense of the unexpected. So it's going live with its commercials.

Match.com is billing the commercials as the first-ever live TV advertising in Britain and the first-ever live reality TV advertising

The ads will feature two lonely hearts looking for love and will be filmed in front of a live audience and air on British station ITV during an episode of the reality show "Love Island." The idea of the ads is to find dates among the general public for these two lovelorn singles.

But the creators also hope that the ads will do something else. In these days of clutter and ad skipping, the aim is that the ads will prove to be compelling content in themselves, as content within content.

"We are trying our best to make this an appointment-to-view ad. It will be heavily promoted. It is the first time that it has been done to this degree, that an advertiser is working so hard to drive people to an advertising spot," Charlotte Harper, UK managing director of Match.com, tells Media Life.

There will be lots of hoopla surrounding the ad, of course, a full summer of marketing activity around Britain by Match.com to find the two singles--a woman and a man--to feature in the ad. To get in the running, hopeful candidates must send in a 30-second video explaining why they’re "too ___ to be single." (Too cute, too handsome, too intelligent, too rich.)

The chosen two will then each do a live ad to sell themselves to potential suitors among the TV viewing public. During their ads, contact details will be displayed so that interested viewers can put their name forward for a date--after registering at Match.com.

Match.com has bought all the space in the three ad pods of a one-hour episode of "Love Island," which is a reality TV show focused on romance. Match.com’s three ads, a one-minute spot and two 40-second spots, will be the only ads to air during the show.

The ads will not be entirely spontaneous. To show an ad on TV it must get approval from the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre. This means that the ads will be pre-scripted and will also air after a delay of about 10 minutes so that the BACC can review them. Despite the slight delay, ITV classifies the ads as live.

"It has to be seen by BACC. If they don’t like it I don’t know what we will do because we will have nothing else to air," says Mick Rigby, joint managing partner at Monkey Communications, the creative planning agency that dreamed up the campaign. "Believe me, I’m scared. There are so many things that can go wrong. That’s the excitement of it."

Those working on the campaign believe that in this world of fragmentation and ad skipping, advertisers will have to make their ads increasingly creative to get viewers to watch. Creating ads that function like content, by being entertaining in their own right, is one way. Going live is another.

The thinking is that seeing the ads live will be more exciting for the viewers. "Things could go wrong. Someone might stutter. But in an age where everything is so polished, that is part of the charm," says Harper.

There’s another advantage to live TV: less cost. While the airtime cost is unlikely to change, when it comes to production the ad won’t cost quite as much a traditional ad, which in Britain can run from $450,000 to $900,000 or more.