November 26, 2007: "The Pachyderm"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
The inspiration for this ad was an old Dennis Miller monologue in which he asked ‘What the heck is the letter ‘C’ doing in the word yacht?", as in "What in the world is an Elephant doing on a 17th century token struck in England and collected as part of the American colonial series?"

That is one totally, completely and bizarrely unexpected motif, which of course makes it an ideal subject for a CRO ad. Not to mention that these tokens look cool and are extremely popular.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
I was tempted to go with: "It appeals equally to colonial coin collectors, and to Mahouts" figuring we’d get a high retention rate with that as lots of people would be puzzled by it, and then would go scrambling to look up Mahout. But ultimately we figured it was simply too bizarre.

We then settled on the ‘Classic American motif’ concept, but with a bit of word-smithing. The original version read: "The colonial coin bearing the classic American motif: The Elephant.", but when combined with the coin description it lacked drama, and it seemed like an awful lot of the word ‘Elephant’ in a small ad.

So we changed the second one to ‘Pachyderm’, and liked the sound of it.