Farber Says: Break Up With Your Debt for the New Year

It's such an unhealthy relationship

Sorry, Debt. But we’re through. It’s not you, it’s me. I want a different life.

Farber casts personal debt as a significant other primed for Dumpsville in amusingly pointed spots from TLC (The Local Collective) and director Nikki Ormerod.

The latter’s excelled with quirky commercials for KFC Canada. Here, her plucky visual sense pays dividends, with bills and past-due notices taking on rude, annoying and toxic lives of their own.

“Debt thrives on silence and shame,” says Farber VP, marketing Terry Yakimchick. “It’s a wake up call for anyone who thinks minimum payments are the only option or that they’ve run out of options. You haven’t. There is a real, legal, structured way out, and we’re here to guide people through it.”

“In this category, people are used to being spoken to with solution-based peace of mind messaging, which can feel generic,” says Matt Litzinger, CCO at TLC. “Our insight was that debt behaves like a bad partner. It takes over your space, your peace, your choices—then convinces you it is just how life is now.”

“That is why we didn’t dramatize debt as a spreadsheet problem,” he says. “We dramatized it as a personal one. When you stop seeing debt as who you are and start seeing it as what is happening to you, change becomes possible.”

The team used no AI or CGI for the clips—relying instead on a costume crafted by Builders Anonymous.

“We had a very talented performer inside the debt suit, and he was amazing at giving us the action and physical presence needed to create these moments,” Litzinger tells Muse. “The suit was quite a challenge, specifically because the actor couldn’t see out of it, so a lot of the performance was done ‘blind.'”

All in an all a savvy appeal, particularly for a Gen-Z audience. The memorable approach reframes the problem in a way that feels instantly relatable—and, best of all, fixable (with a branded assist from Farber, natch).

The work rolls out this week in Canada across TV, OLV, OOH, social and radio.