In one of my classes in college, I distinctly remember a conversation spurring from a comment about how every single business needs advertising. However, someone in the class was feeling particularly witty (and morbid) that day and mentioned that funeral homes don’t need advertisements because, no matter what, they’ll always have clients.
While the class had a good chuckle about it, it turns out funeral homes can actually get pretty creative with their advertisements. If you live in Charlotte, North Carolina, you might have seen a big truck traversing the streets that states “Don’t get vaccinated” in big letters and underneath “Wilmore Funeral Home.”
As it turns out, however, “Wilmore Funeral Home” isn’t real, and BooneOakley, an advertising agency in Charlotte, hired the truck to spread the clever yet melancholic message.
In an interview with CNN, David Oakley, the agency’s director, stated, “I just feel like conventional advertising is not working. Like, just regular messages that say ‘Get the Shot’ or ‘Go Get Vaccinated,’…they just kind of blend in with everything else. We wanted to do something that saw it from a different perspective and kind of shocks people into thinking, ‘Holy moly, man.'”
Well, holy moly, man.
While the truck itself states, “Don’t get vaccinated,” when you visit the website, you’ll find a simple black page that states, “Get vaccinated now. If not, see you soon.”
It’s the ingenuity of the ad and the stark difference from the rest of the messages about the vaccine that are spreading. And while politics might have polarized the language and the ideologies about the vaccine, the absolutism of death can’t be argued, and BooneOakley is hopefully scaring folks right into it.