“Funeral Home” ad broadcasts message for the unvaccinated



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The black truck ad for “Wilmore Funeral Home” delivered this brutal and unexpected message to downtown Charlotte football fans on Sunday as they headed to the Carolina Panthers to play against the New Orleans Saints .

An advertising agency in Charlotte, however, decided to ditch traditional marketing strategies and take matters into their own hands.

But here’s the catch.

There is no “Wilmore Funeral Home” and visiting their website takes you to a landing page asking visitors to do the opposite of what is written on the truck.
An advertising agency hired a truck to drive around Charlotte with a hidden message about vaccination.

“Get vaccinated now” appears on the site, with a message saying, “If not, see you soon. The advertising agency, BooneOakley, had decided it was time to get down to business.

“I just feel like conventional advertising doesn’t work. Like, just regular posts that say ‘Get the Shot’ or ‘Go Get Vaccinated’… they kind of blend in with everything else,” said agency director David Oakley at CNN. “We wanted to do something that sees it from a different perspective and shocks people by making them think, ‘Holy Me, man. “”

Once visitors to the site click on the ‘Get vaccinated now’ box, they are redirected to an area emergency medical facility, StarMed, which administers the Covid-19 vaccines.
In North Carolina, vaccination rates are lower than national figures – about 48.8% of residents are fully vaccinated.

“I think the reason we did it is that we want people to get vaccinated and I believe that even if only one person gets vaccinated because of this billboard I give it a big hit. . One person, it will be worth it for me, “Oakley told CNN.

Knowing there would be crowds for Sunday’s game, Oakley said it seemed like a perfect opportunity to give people “something to talk about other than football.”

Katie Guenther says he certainly did, calling BooneOakley’s approach “smart enough marketing.” She was driving around Charlotte during the match and saw the truck. As he drove past her, she could see crowds of people watching him.

“It was definitely getting a lot of attention,” Guenther, who is vaccinated, told CNN. “At first the message was shocking, of course, until I realized it was a funeral home.”

She added, “I’m not sure I even saw an advertisement for a funeral home and certainly not that way.”

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“We share the frustration with a lot of people who don’t get the vaccine,” Oakley said. “So we were wondering what we could do to help? So our team threw up some ideas one morning. “

And they thought of the companies that deal with some of the people who don’t get the vaccine.

“When people die, it’s funeral homes,” Oakley said.

From there, the group decided to go beyond a vehicle for the message to create a real website that connects people to a vaccination site. StarMed is where many of Oakley’s staff have been vaccinated.

“As a healthcare organization, they were a little, let’s just say a little nervous about it,” he said. “To be honest, we were also nervous about how it would turn out. But they agreed to leave us a link to their site and it was phenomenal, because that’s what made it all work – for me, anyway. “

StarMed has vaccinated “hundreds of thousands of people” and tested as many, according to Adam Hummell, a member of the StarMed marketing team. As of the weekend, Hummell said traffic to land a vaccine appointment at the site had increased significantly.

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“Since the start of the pandemic, here in Charlotte, our company has been the leader in everything related to Covid testing, Covid vaccines and antibody therapy, and the reason we have done this is to lighten a lot of the pressure on the main healthcare systems where they have to take care of people in critical care, and all the surgeries that are lined up and stuff. ”

Hummell said the approach is typical of the agency, which often creates campaigns “to get people talking and raise eyebrows,” he said.

A truck that says “Don’t get vaccinated” at the height of a pandemic? This might raise some eyebrows. But Oakley is hoping he will do more than that.



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