Communities: the New Belgian Agency Betting on Belong Media, Powered by TRES
Benjamin Snyers spent years leading social at Ogilvy Social.Lab. Raphaël Dumont built culture-first campaigns at VICE. In November 2025 they joined forces to launch Communities, a Belgian agency with a clear point of view: brands get more from participating in culture than from buying space in it. TRES is the exclusive platform partner behind the venture.
From paid media to belong media
Communities helps brands and institutions move away from a pure paid media logic toward what the founders call belong media. Instead of interrupting audiences, brands collaborate with them. Instead of broadcasting a message, they take part in shared experiences and let the storytelling regain its authenticity.
Dumont sums up the ambition in one line: help brands speak less to participate more.
That shift is bigger than a creative preference. Communities wants to orchestrate connections between major brands and micro and macro cultures, so that each business finds a legitimate place inside community ecosystems and creates value through co-creation, not just activation.
Where TRES comes in
To do that at scale, the agency needs to know where those communities actually are, what they care about, and how to reach them. That's the platform layer, and it's why Communities secured an exclusive partnership with TRES.
TRES identifies, connects, and activates collectives based on their values, interests, and lifestyles. For Communities, that means a live map of more than 20,000 Belgian and European communities, and a direct route from strategy to real co-creation with the groups that matter for a given brand.
Why this matters
Agencies have talked about community for years. What's new here is the pairing: senior operators from Ogilvy Social.Lab and VICE betting their next chapter on belonging as a discipline, with dedicated infrastructure underneath it rather than a manual spreadsheet exercise. As Snyers puts it, belonging marketing offers brands the chance to be more social than ever.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice, explore TRES or read the original coverage at Media Marketing.