October 13, 2008: "Courtesy of the Gulf"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
Today we felt it was exactly the right time to feature an unusual numismatic object (and thus break the monotonous string of CRO ads featuring beautiful coin after beautiful coin after beautiful coin). Who the heck wants to see those every single week? Exactly.

So, instead, we went with a clump (called a ‘concretion’ by some) of 1780s Mexican 8 Reales fused together after a few hundred years in sea water, with the added indignity of a free-loader sea shell attaching itself securely to their side.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
There were a lot this time, beginning with the Pirate movie inspired: “Aaaargh! With this booty, ye too can be yer own pirate!”

But we feared this would look like we were trying too hard, and so we came up with what we thought was a more sophisticated version of this theme: "Forcibly removed from Davy Jones’ Locker." Which seemed wonderful, until we discovered that there are actually people out there who don’t know to whom ‘Davy Jones’ refers.

So we opted for the line used in the finished ad, which we thought was clever AND gave us the added benefit of literally describing what the reader was looking at. This seemed important, because sometimes the CW pictures are not clear enough to make out the fine details.