Indonesian Media Outlets Receive Mystery Coffins

One of the coffins delivered to Kompas

Several media offices in Indonesia today were surprised by the sudden delivery of coffins. We don’t mean some kind of prank e-card — these were actual physical coffins that were delivered to their respective buildings. Those media offices included Kompas.com, okezone.com, tempointeraktif.com, Jakarta Post, RCTI, ANTV, Kaskus, and salingsilang.com.

These coffins each contained flowers and a piece of paper. Each paper had different number corresponding to the place that received it. For Salingsilang, the paper read ‘you are number # 614’, and for Kompas it stated ‘you are number #661’.

Coffin delivered to tempointeraktif.com

The sender of these coffins was listed as “Rest In Peace Soon”. Police have raided the sender’s address and found it to be the offices of Buzz & Co., an advertising agency.

The company’s CEO, Sumardy Ma, was subsequently arrested. He explained that the coffin delivery was a marketing strategy to launch a book entitled “Rest In Peace Advertising, The Power Of Word Of Mouth Marketing.”

The corresponding website, restinpeacesoon.com, will be active in about five minutes (from the time that we’re writing this). The Twitter account has been engaged in a campaign since this morning.

These shocking deliveries were undeniably controversial, and created an enormous amount of social media buzz, particularly on Twitter. Sending a hundred coffins (30 weren’t delivered after the police intervened) to media companies is certainly not a conventional marketing strategy. The numbers written on paper in that box turned out to be a password to access the afore-mentioned website.

A number of Indonesian political figures have spoken out on this incident, such as Roy Suryo who described it as “unethical and very annoying.” Vice Chairman of the Indonesian House of Representatives, Priyo Budi Santoso called it “a form of terror.”

Sumardy, now detained at the police station, said “Because now we see many boring promotions — well with these coffins [the advertising] cost is cheaper and [it became an] interesting campaign.”

Coffin sent to salingsilang