A space in the Toronto International Film Festival’s four-day “street festival” is apparently costing a year-old travel company almost half of its budget for 2017.

“It’s a good chunk,” Maria Mavridis, a representative from BeforeiFly.com, told the Star — though she wasn’t comfortable divulging the dollar value they spent.

But, like all the other interactive advertisements, known as “activations,” dotting King St. — closed to vehicle traffic between University Ave. and Peter St. — the company bit the financial bullet in the name of exposure.

TIFF has “a huge following, right?” she said, standing inside BeforeiFly’s 360-degree, virtual-reality, green-screen photo booth. By posting the photos from the booth on social media and tagging their company, she explained, pedestrians could win a trip for two to Banff.

By mid-morning Thursday, the pedestrian zone between traffic blockades was plastered with similar offers. Air France set up an elaborate mock-bistro, where young women in red berets and striped shirts drew passersby in for an offer of free non-alcoholic champagne and macarons.

Their scheme? Snap photos with their Eiffel Tower statue, use the company’s hashtag, and give yourself the chance to win two tickets to Paris.

Every detail of the Parisian bistro experience was fine-tuned, from the plastic foliage installed around the fences to a jaunty red umbrella overhead.

Only a few feet away, though, the Ontario College of Trades vied against the glamour to draw attention to a looming shortage of tradespeople in the Canadian film industry — 250,000 people, according to the college.

“It was very difficult, because we don’t have the Air France money,” said OCT marketing manager Tyler Charlebois. “We’re funded by our members’ fees. This was all about getting awareness and showing what people do, so it was different from being corporate brands.”

Every day, the college would be drawing attention to a new trade; on Thursday, it was autobody work, so there was a plasma cutter set up to try out. Charlebois, too, couldn’t provide an exact figure for how much their activation was costing them — but he said it was all part of a larger partnership with TIFF, and added that it was just important for them to have “a footprint” there.

“When you go further behind the camera, there’s the hairstylists, there’s the electricians, there’s the cook and the chef, there’s the iron workers, there’s the automotive folks,” Charlebois said. “It’s not just the Angelina Jolies of the world.”

Wandering farther down the block, hemmed in for a large part by lemonade advertisement banners or Grolsch brewery logos, Casper mattresses offer pedestrians an eight-minute nap experience in one of the sleep pods built into the vehicle.

Take off your shoes, slip on some padded slippers provided for the experience; inside, a red lacquer phone, when lifted to the ear, croons out bird sounds or bedtime stories. More than one person can occupy the pods at once, company representatives cheerfully informed the Star.

Only a few feet away from King St., the regular vendors of a farmer’s market in David Pecaut Square set up their tents to sell fruit, vegetables, flowers and pies. The glitz and glamour of TIFF street brands are not present — some baskets are labelled in masking tape — but neither are price-tags.

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Rob McCamus, who stood with his brother to sell the maple syrup their family has been making for a century in Peterborough, said they were paying around $2,000 to claim that spot for a year. They had to leave at 2 p.m. on Thursday, but would be back to raise the tent again next week.

“I’ve never been near the place for TIFF,” McCamus chuckled. “It’s interesting, very interesting.”