November 12, 2007: "It Burned Down"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
This was probably our most controversial ad to date.

We wanted to try a new spin on placing a coin in its historical context, this time illustrating that this issue was produced during troubled times at the mint. Now, having said that, we must admit that we took some artistic license with the dates. The mint actually burned down in January of 1816, just after delivery of these coins took place. But the overall story is true and we felt that the ad would still be acceptable.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The first iteration read: “1815: A bad year for the mint (it burned down), A good year for coin collectors.”, but we didn’t want to make an overt and inaccurate connection between 1815 and the fire. Plus it just didn’t look right to have the date both in the coin description and then repeated directly below it in the caption.

We also tried to resolve the 1815 vs 1816 issue by making the date a little more general: "Tough times for the mint (it burned down), good times for coin collectors." And while that would have been technically correct, the message was just too ambiguous and the ad became too bland.

So we decided to say ‘year’, without stating which year (or even if it was a calender year). And we think that worked.