May 7, 2007: "Decent Date"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We wanted to tell a key date story about this one, but without saying something too boring or obvious. At the end of the day, I’m not sure we accomplished that objective as we just couldn’t come up with anything terribly interesting or creative. On the other hand, we did get a slew of calls and emails about the coin, and we can’t complain about that.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We thought “The key datest of all the key date coins” was sort of clever, but the risk in using a made-up word like ‘datest’ is that people will assume it’s a typo or something. Or they simply won’t get it (actually, I’m not sure I get it).

We also considered, briefly, a totally different idea: “Full cartwheel luster on this key date cartwheel – try saying that three times fast.” This was intended to be a play on the little known fact that cartwheel is a term that can be used to describe luster AND a nickname for silver dollar, but of course playing on little known facts is not necessarily a good recipe for writing ad copy. But while this idea didn’t work here, we thought the ‘try saying that three times fast’ line wasn’t bad. Which means you might just see that idea again – in some new iteration – in a future ad.