October 22, 2007: "Haiku"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We had no choice on this one – the gigantic word ‘Haiku’ on the coin forced us to write this ad caption in the form of a Japanese Haiku poem (even though the fact that it is the same word is purely coincidental).

Have you ever tried to write a haiku about a coin? (I’m going to guess that you haven’t). It’s not easy.

Of course we followed the standard ‘Five syllables in line one, seven in line two and five in line three’ format. But the trickiest part was making it obvious this was a Haiku by using traditional Japanese techniques, such as beginning with a single word and an exclamation point, and having a nature theme.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The first attempt was terrible: "Beautiful and rare, from island paradise, the condition is pleasing."

Then we considered going with "Woosh! The Redbook flies, open to page 380, listing this token." That only works if you pronounce 380 as ‘three-eighty’, and we thought it wasn’t clear that it was a haiku.

In retrospect, that one was pretty good and maybe we should have used it.