February 11, 2008: "Scot Meets Raymond"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We wanted to highlight the spectacular confluence of a great, classic design with beautiful, traditional album toning, but without being too literal about it.

So we opted to use the names of the designer and the name of the man behind the old coin albums that cause the toning, figuring that the cognescenti would know exactly what we were talking about, and the people who didn’t know what we were talking about would endeavor to find out what the ad meant.

The other notable thing about this ad is that I wrote it at about 3:30 AM after waking up early to catch a flight, suddenly remembering that the ad deadline was that day and then having to come up with a coin, a concept and a piece of finished art in the 15 minutes before my cab was scheduled to arrive.

Not a bad result given the circumstances if I do say so myself.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The only alternative I seriously considered during those 15 minutes was "They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.", which was just a little too easy and not interesting or memorable enough.