• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, March 7, 2024

Titan Casket wants to save a few lives this weekend. In a new campaign called “Bury Daylight Savings,” the D2C casket company is raising awareness about health risks associated with America’s archaic commitment to changing its clocks twice a year.

And yes, the company knows there is a certain self-defeating irony in a casket company trying to defeat death.

The effort is based on the insight that hospitals historically see a 24% jump in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal accidents each year linked to Daylight Savings.

The idea came from Ryan Reynold’s Maximum Effort, the ad agency owned by funny guy Ryan Reynolds, says Joshua Siegel, co-founder and chief operating officer of the Seattle based company.

“We’d met with Maximum Effort over the years and are big fans of what they’re doing in the advertising and entertainment world,” he says. “They found our mission interesting, and when they came across this health data, they came to us with a pitch I couldn’t say 'no’ to.”

The campaign stars David Dastmalchian, an actor known for supporting roles in a number of superhero films, who looks delightfully at ease around a casket.

“At Titan Casket, we obviously have an interest in you dying,” he says. “But we can wait.”

The video includes a call to action, steering people to a website to find their Congressional representatives’ contact information and encouraging them to end Daylight Savings. The practice, first introduced as an energy-saver during World War 1, has had a chaotic history, having been repealed once and then reinstated.

Siegel says the video is part of the young company’s ongoing effort to carve out a brand voice that’s different but still respectful.

“We’re three things,” he explains. “We are the best funeral product marketplace out there. With deep empathy and responsibility, we’ll provide a casket, and now have thousands of reviews about how well we do that.”

The second is a determined political angle, as the company continues to work with the Federal Trade Commission to modernize the funeral rule, which gives families the right to buy caskets outside of the funeral home.

Finally, the company is committed to finding attention-getting ways to talk about death.

“No one has built a consumer-facing funeral brand before,” he says, “so we’re still learning about the right customer, tone and channels.”

Humor is part of that. The company mostly targets people between 40 and 60, typically shopping for caskets for their parents. And they’re the kind of consumers who have a fondness for “disruptive and more taboo brands, like Liquid Death or Ro.”

There’s no paid spending for the video. “We’re still too small to buy media at scale,” he says. So like all its previous activations, including a product appearance in a recent Taylor Swift video, the best hope for getting attention is by making people laugh.

 “Then hopefully, they’ll learn something about their rights and maybe have a five-minute conversation about what they want at the end of their lives.”