April 23, 2012: "Hot Red Lincoln"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
The especially deep mirrors, unusually clean surfaces and spectacularly brilliant color of this coin all but demanded that we celebrate it by using a single-letter variant of the 1955 hit "Hot Rod Lincoln", a song title that surprisingly took until now to appear in a CRO ad.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
It would be wonderful to say that we had a number of excellent alternatives this week, but the reality is that your author flat forgot about the deadline, received a panicked call from CW telling us we were late and, if we did not send in in our ad in the next 23 minutes, the 1/4 page space dedicated to CRO in each issue was instead going to be a big, blank, white rectangle this time.

But since we weren’t about to let that happen, we selected this coin, thought of this caption, whipped up this artwork and fired it off just before the proverbial ad window slammed shut.