The black truck ad for “Wilmore Funeral Home” delivered the harsh and unexpected message to football fans in downtown Charlotte on Sunday as they watched the Carolina Panthers play the New Orleans Saints.
However, one Charlotte advertising agency decided to abandon traditional marketing strategies and take matters into their own hands.
But here’s the catch.
“Get vaccinated now” pops up on the site with a message that says, “If not, see you soon.” The advertising agency, Booneokle, had decided it was time to get serious.
Agency director David Oakley told CNN, “I think traditional ads aren’t working. Like, regular messages saying ‘get the shot’ or ‘go get vaccinated’ … they just mix with everything. We do.” “We wanted to do something that would look at it from a different perspective and shock people into thinking, ‘Holy Moly, man.'”
“I think we did it because we want people to get vaccinated and I believe that even if just one person gets vaccinated because of that billboard, I make it a huge success. Just one person, It would be worth it to me,” Oakley told CNN.
Knowing there would be crowds for Sunday’s game, Oakley said it seemed like an ideal opportunity to give people “something to talk about other than football”.
“It was definitely getting a lot of attention,” Guenther, who has been vaccinated, told CNN. “At first the message was shocking, of course, until I realized it was a funeral home.”
She said, “I’m not sure I’ve even seen a funeral home ad and certainly not like that.”
“We share the frustration with many people who are not getting vaccinated,” Oakley said. “So we were thinking, What can we do to help? So our team was throwing up some ideas one morning.”
And they thought about businesses that are dealing with some people who aren’t getting vaccinated.
“When people die, that’s the funeral home,” Oakley said.
From there, the group decided to go beyond a vehicle for the message of creating a real website that connects people to the vaccination site. StarMed is where many of Oakley’s employees have been vaccinated.
“As a health care organization, they were kinda, let’s just get a little nervous about it,” he said. “We were also nervous about it, to be honest, and how it would end. But they agreed to link us to their site and it was phenomenal, because that’s how the whole thing works—for me anyway.” “
According to Adam Hummel, a member of StarMed’s marketing team, StarMed has vaccinated “hundreds of thousands of people” and tested the same number of people. Since the weekend, Hummel said the site has seen a significant increase in traffic to prevent the appointment of a vaccine.
“Since the start of the pandemic, here in Charlotte, our company has been a leader in all things COVID testing, COVID vaccines, and antibody therapy, and that is because we have taken a lot of the pressure off the major healthcare systems where they are in the ICU. People have to be taken care of, and all the surgeries that line up and all that stuff.”
Hummel said the approach is typical of the agency, which often creates campaigns “to get people talking and raise a few eyebrows,” he said.
A truck that says “don’t get vaccinated” at the height of the pandemic? This may raise some eyebrows. But Oakley hopes it does much more than that.
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