TORONTO — (CNN) The Wathan Funeral Home wants you to text and drive — they’ve even put up a billboard asking you to.
“It is a horrible thing for a funeral home to do,” they say on their website. “But we’re not a funeral home.”
The billboard is part of a campaign created by a Montreal ad agency to help stop Canadians from texting and driving.
2015 was the third consecutive year in which driver distraction contributed to more road deaths than any other category on roads patrolled by the Ontario Provincial Police, the department said.
Statistics like those, the “funeral home” website says, “should make you even madder than our billboard did.”
Dark public service announcements are nothing new, especially warning people about the dangers of texting while driving.
Last week, Sprint unveiled a sculpture in Miami that takes the remains of wrecked car and fashioned into an Emoji. Next to the piece is a sign saying “DN’T TXT & DRIVE”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a particularly jarring PSA that involves a car crash caused by texting while driving.
NHTSA blames texting while driving as a factors in the 3,129 fatalities in distracted driving crashes in 2014, the most recent year for such statistics.
A police department in the UK took this approach in a video posted to Youtube in 2009. It has more than 2 million views.
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