June 4, 2012: "Buffalo Over Date"

Author:
C. Sloan

Concept:
Thanks to the inspired work of our guest author, this week’s effort represents a whole new direction for CRO ads. And that direction is, of course, the pictogram (not unlike those you might expect to find on a Mensa test in a crappy inflight magazine), in this case representing the phrase Buffalo over Date (i.e. Buffalo Overdate).

And while I can’t say for sure that we’ll venture this way again, it was a fun (in our opinion) twist that might result in longer lingering than usual over this ad by CW readers.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The first idea here was "Wooden you like this nickel?" which seemed extremely clever, though the wooden part wasn’t exactly the positive association we were looking for.

Which led us to "Shhhh – we don’t want to create a stampede for this coin.", though that would have made a lot more sense had we shown the Buffalo side facing up (which of course we could not do since the obverse overdate is the key attribute of this coin). Also, we DO want to create a stampede for this (and all coins on our site, actually), so it didn’t exactly represent truth in advertising.

So we headed for the extremely literal but artfully arranged "Buffaloverdate.", which might well have won had our guest author not come through in the clutch.