March 2, 2008: "By Any Other Name"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
This one popped into my head all of a sudden, as the name Rosa Americana evidently triggered some far, far distant Shakespearean memory of a quote from Romeo and Juliette. "Hey, that would make a cool ad", I thought to myself.

At first we were concerned that this might come across as snooty (first use of this word ever on this site), but after we thought about it for a while we concluded that a likely buyer of this coin would recognize the (slightly modified) quote. And if he or she didn’t, then they’d probably sit there and study the ad a little longer and try to figure it out, and that would be OK too.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The actual quote by Juliet is ". . . a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet.", which wouldn’t work as is for several reasons:

First, we thought the word ‘name’ would be associated with Eliasberg in this context, and we certainly didn’t want to express the sentiment that a Rosa from any other name collection would be as ‘sweet’ as this one.

Second, the word ‘smell’ is terribly off-putting in my opinion, even when used in a positive context as here. So we really didn’t want to put that in a caption.

So we played with a few alternatives, and ended up changing the original quote just enough to make sense in the ad, but not so much that it wouldn’t be easily recognizable.