By Steve Kupferman

Photo of a Basic Funerals ad in Osgoode Station, by Harry Choi/Torontoist.

The TTC’s advertising spaces are generally the domain of ads hawking life-improving things, like continuing education, or foreign language lessons—or otherwise things that only seem life-improving while one is consuming them, like Taco Bell. But lately, one company has been using public transit to advertise services more suited to the improvement of death.

Advertisements for a company called Basic Funerals have appeared in subway stations and on subway trains in recent weeks, promising exactly what the name would suggest: no-frills, cut-rate funerals.
True, providers of funerary services have to advertise somewhere, but the context, in this case, is jarring. The TTC carries passengers as they go about all the little errands that together constitute life. The ads, while plain and unobtrusive, are reminders that there are certain things even a red rocket can’t outrun.
Pictured, above, is an in-station Basic Funerals ad, with a spare layout, featuring nothing but a URL and a logo. There are also vertical posters in some subway cars that have pictures of smiling people, with short customer testimonials superimposed.
Dominic Mazzone is the chairman of Basic Funerals. “We really didn’t do it to raise eyebrows,” he says of the ad campaign, and then pauses. “I’m sure it’s raising eyebrows here and there.”
Mazzone founded Basic Funerals about two years ago with his friend Eric Vandermeersch, a licensed funeral director who now serves as the company’s CEO.
Basic Funerals uses online and telephone ordering systems, and keeps relatively small facilities. (They rent out cemetery chapels for customers who want large services.) The streamlined operation, says Mazzone, can help customers realize significant savings over traditional funeral home services. The company has expanded to cities all over Ontario, and is looking to move into other provinces, and the States.
But Mazzone concedes that bringing his organization’s message to the TTC’s ridership is a tricky matter, and in fact there’s some precedent to confirm this. At least one other advertiser has tried to walk the line between life and death on the TTC’s ad boards and failed spectacularly—though in that prior case the ads were for a radio station, decidedly tasteless, and arguably in contravention of the TTC’s photo policies. By contrast, the Basic Funerals ads are extremely mild, and they certainly aren’t breaking any rules.
Basic Funerals chose the TTC because it carries a large cross-section of the age group they’re trying to reach. “It turns out it’s a middle-aged demographic,” says Mazzone.
The company tried to keep things low-key. “When choosing ad copy, what we really did is say: ‘okay, we’re really going to be introducing ourselves, here.’”
“We knew our first ad out had to be pretty basic.”
They decided against putting their prices on the posters. “If we did it,” adds Mazzone, “it would be incredibly subtle.” Basic Funerals hasn’t ruled out launching another TTC campaign, once this one breathes its last.