If you live in Toronto, you may have noticed a provocative, shocking, and morbid billboard advertisement near the Gardiner Expressway.
The ad’s bold text encourages drivers to text and drive – a message from a so-called Watham Funeral Home.
Dumb as hell, right?
When you visit the website for the “funeral home,” however, any disturbed or angry drivers will quickly discover that the business doesn’t really exist. The billboard is actually a public service announcement created by award-winning Toronto ad agency John St. and Cieslok Media.
The website contains a chilling message.
“It is a horrible thing for a funeral home to do,” reads the text. “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.”
The website contains tabs for “flowers,” “caskets,” and “monuments,” each of which produce a shocking texting and driving statistic when you click on it. Despite the thousands of people who die every year as a result of texting and driving, too many drivers continue to do it. As the website states, more than half of people in Ontario admit to reading text messages behind the wheel.
The hope of the website is that its disturbing texting and driving stats “make you even madder than our billboard did.”
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