June 6, 2011: "Still Together"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
In our view, the most compelling feature of this cool proof set is that it actually looks like a set.

Which is not surprising, since it is an original set which has been together for years (110 years, to be exact), during which the coins acquired similar and nicely matched original toning before being sent to PCGS and slabbed in sequentially numbered holders.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We started with "Cost $2.68 at the Philadelphia Mint in 1901. Worth more today.", which we actually thought was pretty good.

And we might have used it, except that we didn’t know how much this set actually cost in 1901 (i.e. face value or some premium), and I was slightly concerned about having the reader fixate on the price, instead of on the coins a few inches above it.

So we opted for the caption in our final ad, which sounded to me slightly like a song lyric that you can’t quite place, and elicited warm fuzzy feelings in our extensive focus group testing.