The 60-Year-Old Swede

Why it works

Two men jog side by side at the same easy pace while a narrator explains that they are evenly matched, because the average 30-year-old Canadian is in about the same shape as the average 60-year-old Swede. The spot came from ParticipACTION, a new national fitness body run by the marketing consultant Keith McKerracher, who fused two unrelated ideas from a book by the exercise scientist Roy Shephard, one showing that an active 60-year-old could be as fit as a sedentary 30-year-old and one ranking Sweden far above Canada. It aired only six times, during Canadian Football League games in 1973, yet the national embarrassment it caused sparked a debate in Parliament and the comparison was repeated in the media for years. It is studied as a lesson in how one provocative, quotable comparison can set a national agenda on almost no budget. ParticipACTION became one of the world's longest-running physical-activity campaigns; by 1978, 79% of Canadians knew its name.