'Stop cooking with cheese' campaign comes from 32-year-old with no kids
ROY MacGREGOR
Friday, March 24, 2006
The idea came to him in a caf챕.
A woman was talking at another table about her grown son. It was time, she was saying, for him to quit the family home, strike out on his own, get the hell out.
Neil Frisby pretended to be studying the menu. He'd come to the small caf챕 with Katja Winterhalder, his creative partner at the Cossette Group, a Montreal advertising agency, and they were supposed to be brainstorming over a new campaign for the Dairy Farmers of Canada.
He stared at the dishes -- so many of them prepared with various cheeses -- and kept listening to the woman complaining.
And then, as happens more often in comic books, a small light bulb clicked on over his head.
He grinned across at Winterhalder. He had it.
They would do a campaign reversal. Instead of encouraging consumers to come to their product; they would suggest they stay away -- but they would tie it all back to the dilemma faced by the woman with the grown son who wouldn't move out.
"Stop cooking with cheese."
Months later, Neil Frisby's little advertising epiphany has entered the Canadian consciousness. Make a joke about your children beginning to wear on you and someone is bound to say, "Stop cooking with cheese."
Even those grown children still hanging about the beer fridge and microwave -- (wait a moment, while I count the ones within sight) -- laugh about it.
The Dairy Farmers of Canada, of course, love it. Business couldn't be better.
This week, Statistics Canada essentially backed up Frisby's caf챕 revelation by publishing a study in its Social Trends magazine that says more grown children are living with their parents than ever before in Canada.
Back in 1981, 41 per cent of young adults ages 20-24 were still at home. In 2001, it had risen to 57 per cent.
No figures are available for March 24, 2006, but a reasonable estimate would place that figure, this precise morning, at roughly 99.8 per cent.
Nor are there figures for those young adults between, say, 25 and 32, an age called "transitional adulthood" by some experts but known as the "modern teenage years" to the only legitimate experts in this field: exasperated parents.
StatsCan says the phenomenon is far more likely to be found in larger cities than in smaller ones and towns -- and far, far more likely than in villages and rural areas.
In Vancouver, for example, 41 per cent of parents have grown children still expecting their laundry to be hauled from the dryer before wrinkles set in, whereas only 17 per cent of parents in more rural areas have a similar situation.
StatsCan cites the presence of universities in major centres as one reason. There may also be fewer microwaves, plasma high-definition televisions and second and third cars in the driveways of rural homes.
Intriguingly, the man who came up with the stop-cooking-with-cheese campaign can't really relate to the situation. Only 32, he has no children.
In fact, Frisby moved out of his own home in London, England, at the age of 18. "My Dad," he says, "wouldn't have had it any other way."
He also has no nostalgia whatsoever for the cooking he walked away from. He loves his mother dearly, but, as he says matter-of-factly: "The British can't cook."
He trusts, now that he is married to a francophone and living in Quebec, he has seen the last of overcooked vegetables and tough meat.
"I came here for the cooking," he laughs.
He has never been behind a campaign that has so touched a public nerve. It has not only made people laugh; it has, much to his surprise, outraged some.
Every so often an e-mail arrives or is sent his way complaining about the campaign.
"We even had one not long ago from a professor, a man with a PhD," he says, "accusing me of demoting family values with the cheese campaign.
He had recently 'lost' his daughter when she moved out of the house and he missed her and he was sort of blaming us for it.
"It's quite sad, really."
In another ad, written for radio, an elderly couple is trying to get their grown son to leave by telling him everything they can imagine he doesn't want to hear -- including that he was adopted -- and almost instantly the ad agency received a complaint from a woman with two adopted children, saying she found the ad extremely offensive.
What all this tells Neil Frisby is that Canadian kids living at home -- or even not living at home -- is a hot button that he may have accidentally pushed that day when the light bulb went off in the Montreal caf챕.
And that's just fine by him.
There has been talk about expanding the successful cheese campaign to include getting rid of neighbours who drop around too often, or mothers-in-law who come to stay, but he's not convinced.
"I think we should just stick to the kids theme.
"It's obviously working."
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