Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

This billboard, which went up this week next to the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, is provocative in the extreme—blatantly urging drivers to text and drive as a way of drumming up business for the advertiser, Wathan Funeral Home.

But there's a method to the madness.

It's actually a PSA from the Montreal office of agency John St., in partnership with out-of-home company Cieslok Media. No, Wathan Funeral Home isn't real. But it does have a website, where angry motorists who've Googled the place are confronted with this message:

If you're here, you've probably seen our "Text and Drive" billboard. And if you have, you probably came to this website to tell us what horrible people we are for running an ad like that. And you'd be right.

It is a horrible thing for a funeral home to do. But we're not a funeral home.

We're just trying to get Canadians to stop texting and driving, which is projected to kill more people in Ontario this year than drinking and driving. That's right. More. And while most people wouldn't even think about drinking and driving, over half of Ontario drivers admit to reading texts while behind the wheel. That's more than half of the drivers on the road today risking their lives, their passengers' lives and the lives of their fellow motorists and pedestrians.

Which should make you even madder than our billboard did....

The Dumb Ways to Die ads in Australia, like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, show that public service campaigns have a lot to teach about marketing.Dumb Ways to Die can be considered among the most innovative public service campaigns ever. The campaign launched in November 2012 in Australia, aimed at promoting train safety, an onerous topic, boring to deliver yet important for public safety.

Railroad departments the world over run such campaigns to get commuters to listen to them, and to reduce the number of accidents and fatalities.

None of them comes to mind however when you’re asked to recall train safety campaigns. None barring Dumb Ways to Die. Why is that?...