September 24, 2007: "Some Guy"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
The medal itself is astonishing, but we wanted to bring it to life and introduce the story behind it in a surprising and provocative way.

The fact is, Benjamin Franklin was a previous owner – as he was of all Libertas Americana medals. Franklin actually commissioned the striking of the medals and paid for the entire order himself. When he later requested reimbursement from the Constitutional Congress, he was turned down. We put this in the category of "neat stories that no one knows", which made it particularly good ad fodder. Plus it highlights what must be one of the most interesting provenances in all of numismatics.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The first version of this ad said "The list of previous owners includes Benjamin Franklin." (omitting the "some guy named" qualifier), but it just seemed less interesting that way.

As an aside, we always spend a lot of time choosing not just what we believe are the right words, but the length and positioning of sentences and line breaks so that the reader will pause, naturally, at the right time and the emphasis will be on the things we consider to be key to telling the story. In this case, we wanted there to be an element of surprise when the reader reached the important (and surprising) name.