If you’re hoping to keep drivers from getting distracted on the road, slapping up a massive funeral home-sponsored billboard emblazoned with the words TEXT AND DRIVE seems like a great place to start. Right? Right.
If you’re traveling on the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, Ontario, today, that’s exactly what you’ll see. But when you pull out your phone (after pulling over, obviously) to Google the Wathan Funeral Home, all you’ll find is a mysterious website explaining that there is no Wathan Funeral Home. The billboard is actually a twisted PSA, and the website offers no other information about who is actually behind the scheme.
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.
