The Drive: Billboard delivers dark, clever distracted driving message

A digital billboard put up last week along a busy freeway in downtown Toronto blatantly encouraging motorists to "Text and Drive" generated a lot of buzz and even outrage that the advertisement was sponsored by a funeral home.

On the surface, it appeared as if the Wathan Funeral Home was trying to drum up business. But really, the eye-catching and somewhat morbid message was a deftly crafted public service announcement to get drivers to put down their phones.

Curious folks and aghast motorists who visited wathanfuneral.com quickly learned Wathan is a fictitious business. The hard-hitting message about the dangers and deadly effects of texting and driving, however, is all too real.

"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," the website's message says. "It is a horrible thing for a funeral home to do."

"But we're not a funeral home," the message continued. "We're just trying to get Canadians to stop texting and driving, which, if current trends continue, is expected to exceed fatalities from drinking and driving as early as next year. 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 campaign got lots of news coverage, both north of the border and in the U.S. A companion YouTube video drew nearly 87,000 views and thousands of shares on social media. And that's exactly the response the Montreal-based John St. advertising firm wanted.

"People see and hear the words 'don't text and drive' almost every day, but the number of people doing it keeps going up," said Mylène Savoie, the firm's managing director. "So we wanted to think of a different way of saying it that would make people think about the consequences, which is where 'Text and Drive' came from."

The ad agency partnered with Cieslok Media to put up the sign and created a website to set the record straight, lest somebody thought a funeral home was really promoting the illegal behavior.

This month in Miami, Sprint unveiled its "The Last Emoji," a sculpture made from a crashed junkyard car and the words "Dn't Txt & Drive."

In 2014, 3,179 people were killed and 431,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers on America's roads, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said. And research suggests 800,000 drivers in America are texting while driving every moment of the day.

"We are always interested in anything that will catch people's attention or get the message across in a creative way," said Kara Macek, a spokeswoman for the Governors Highway Safety Administration. "But we leave it up to our individual states to determine the most appropriate messaging for their market. In any case, the most effective education campaigns are those that are coupled with high-visibility law enforcement. Education plus enforcement is the key to changing behavior."

Follow news about traffic and commuting at The Drive on startribune.com. Got traffic or transportation questions, or story ideas? E-mail drive@startribune.com, tweet @stribdrive or call Tim Harlow at 612-673-7768.