September 9, 2013: "High on the Hog-mouth"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
This stunning gem 310 year-old taler bearing the obverse portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I presented us with two possible ad caption topics:

Leopold’s absurd hairdo, a style which apparently went out of favor in 1705 and remained so until it famously reappeared in the Farrah Fawcett poster your author had in his bedroom in 1976, or
Leopold’s impressively protruding ‘Hapsburg Jaw’, which resulted in his being nicknamed (probably by mean high school girls) ‘Leopold the Hogmouth’.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We started with that hairdo idea, with "Time to replace your Farrah Fawcett poster." And while I thought that was a real hoot, it falls into a caption category I like to refer to as a ‘joke once removed’, meaning that it refers to something which isn’t actually in the ad, forcing the reader to make an obtuse connection AND then get the joke (which is sort of a lot to ask IMO).

So we instead focused our efforts on hog-concepts, starting with "We’re high on this Hog-mouth.", a play on the phrase ‘live high on the hog."

But then we figured if we were going to do that, we really had to use the entire phrase, resulting in the more complete caption in our final ad.