September 27, 2010: "Entomology"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
Actually, this one turned out to be a real challenge, since the extremely detailed grasshopper on this piece lent itself to so many potentially entertaining ideas.

Ultimately, though, we decided that the most interesting angle was the utterly unexpected meeting of entomology (the scientific study of insects), and numismatics, best highlighted in the same stilted way you might introduce two people at a cocktail party (just before you leave the them in awkward silence and head back to the bar).

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
For some reason, we initially found ourselves fixated on the old Kung Fu TV series in which Master Po kept calling David Carradine ‘Grasshopper’ in those fuzzy flashback scenes.

Which led us to "When you can snatch the Conder Token from my hand it will be time for you to leave." But we were afraid this sounded like we were threatening people not to steal this token from us (which is hardly the kind of message we want in an ad), not to mention that it would be absolutely baffling to anyone who is not familiar with the show.

Causing us to cool it on the Kung Fu stuff and instead try the very direct "100% guaranteed to bug you.", but alas that too conveyed an odd sentiment while featuring a gag that frankly seemed too easy.

So we went with the scientific introduction in our final ad instead.