‘Sadly on June 3, 2002, Season Two of the series Six Feet Under passed peacefully…. [It] will be dearly remembered in rebroadcasts starting February 26 and is thankfully survived by a healthy new Third Season….’ The ad, by Toronto agency Taxi, not only reads like an obit, it looks like an obit.

It is appropriately listed under the heading ‘Deaths’ in Toronto urban weeklies Eye and Now, as well as in the Arts & Entertainment section of the Toronto Star – that way there is no chance poor, old grieving Aunt Betsey will stumble across it while searching for Uncle Moe’s obit.

The ad for the HBO series, which is carried in Canada on The Movie Network (TMN), is part of an overall macabre campaign that launched in mid-February and also includes direct mail and print. According to Domenic Vivolo, SVP marketing and sales at Astral Television Networks, which operates TMN, there are two overall objectives.

‘First and foremost, we’re trying to get the message across that the third season is upon us and you don’t want to miss it,’ he says. ‘Second, HBO provides great entertainment and we want to connect ourselves to that brand.’

A sprawling cemetery that looks a lot like Arlington National Cemetery, in Arlington, Va., which of course is the resting place of many war vets, embodies the front of the direct mail collateral, which splits in the middle and slides open to introduce the hit TV show.

‘The slide piece is quite unique,’ says Vivolo. ‘We first used it for The Sopranos [season four] and got such a high response rate…our subscription was up over budgeted expectations.’

The DM piece landed in the mailboxes of 300,000 cable subscribers between Manitoba and the East Coast, the area covered by TMN’s service. Astral used the databases of its cable affiliates, like Rogers and Cogeco, to reach consumers.

Meanwhile, a poster featuring the cast of Six Feet Under glumly sitting around a table – the whole scene is nestled in a bed of funeral-like flowers – has been erected in 400 cable call centres. A print version is running in magazines as well, including Feature, TMN’s entertainment guide, 500,000 of which were circulated in the Toronto Star on Feb. 22.

So far death has proven to be an intrigue. ‘It’s too hard to tell from a numbers perspective,’ says Vivolo, ‘but at our customer care department, it’s one of our highest call-in offers. It ranks a bit higher than The Sopranos.’

Despite the general feeling of ickiness surrounding death in our society, Vivolo said he wasn’t too concerned about negative reactions. ‘We’re trying to break through a bit, and we have the luxury of being more edgy because of our pay-service stature.’

He adds: ‘This type of product lent itself perfectly to the obit piece and we’ve had a lot of good response. People get the inside joke and they react to it.’