May 12, 2008: "General Pleasure"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We’ve run an ad featuring a Libertas Americana Medal before (an epic Silver example that Dave still pines over) in which we highlighted the fact that Benjamin Franklin actually commissioned and purchased these pieces with his own money. And frankly (no pun intended) we thought that the Franklin connection was so important and interesting that we decided to do it again. Though this time with a different spin, trotting out one of several interesting contemporary Franklin quotes in which he describes his enthusiasm for the finished product.

The one featured in our ad comes from correspondence to Robert Livingston (who, with Franklin, was a member of the committee to create the Declaration of Independence) on April 15, 1783. Plus the word choice is a hoot by modern standards, and was simply begging to be a CRO ad caption.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The only thing we seriously considered was to remove Franklin’s name from the ad, and just use the quote unattributed in hopes of generating more intrigue. But we decided that was a terrible idea.