Georgia Funeral Director is Buried in Free Publicity
A Georgia funeral home owner “urned” millions of dollar in media attention by offering a free funeral to anyone who signed up for an unusual promotion.
Barry Miller of McGuire, Jennings & Miller Funeral Home came up with a legally binding agreement.
If you signed the contract admitting you planned to get behind the wheel while intoxicated on New Year’s Eve, crash and kill yourself while impaired, Miller would give you a casket, flowers and a burial all for free.
It’s a freebie that no one signed up to accept.
“In today’s society, sometimes you have to go to the extreme to get attention and that’s what we were trying to do,” says Miller.
Long before he opened his first funeral home, Miller lost a loved one who was killed by a drunk driver. He says the pain of that memory is what inspired the offer.
When asked whether it was just a publicity stunt, Miller told reporters, “If I had not lost a family member, you could call it that, but since I have been on that side of the fence, the answer is ‘No.’ I’m doing this to motivate people to make the right decisions.”
Miller has made this same offer every year for the last decade. Only one person has ever expressed any interest, and that didn’t last.
If anyone ever does sign up, Miller says his first call will be to local authorities to provide them with the name of the New Year’s Eve celebrant officers will need to watch.
Mr. Miller says he’s actually received letters from alcoholics saying that they had fallen off the wagon but the free funeral offer really shook them up.
My calculator would explode if I tried to add up the value of all the free PR Miller has received over the years with this simple offer that he’s never had to honor.
Miller makes my personal PR Hall of Fame with this idea. He markets his funeral business without spending any money and sends a chilling message to would-be drunk drivers at the same time.
How about you? What can you dream up that will accomplish the same thing for your business? Smart public relations isn’t about what’s in your press kit or how clever the headline is on a news release. It begins and ends with the story idea itself.
The old ways of doing PR are dead and buried. Writing meaningless press releases and sending them into newsrooms simply doesn’t work. They’re inundated with them. Of course, you’re welcome to keep doing it that way, but in the words of Barry Miller, “It’s your funeral.”
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