Back in the spring, we wrote about Costco’s travel urns (shown here), which are useful if you need to scatter a loved one’s ashes far from home. Today, in a timely Halloween blog post, CMO magazine’s Constantine von Hoffman gives us a refresher on the broader subject of death and marketing. Among the topics he touches on: ads on coffins, coffin-themed promotions, college-themed caskets, sponsored funerals and ad campaigns for death-scene cleaning companies and pet cemeteries. It reminds us of that campaign a few years ago by Acclaim Entertainment, which claimed to be paying grieving families to advertise videogames with tiny ads on their relatives’ headstones. That turned out to be hoax.

—Posted by Tim Nudd