September 17, 2007: "In New York?"

Author:
J.Agre

Concept:
We were trying to highlight the fact that this 1776 New York note was denominated in Spanish Milled Dollars. Unfortunately, we couldn’t think of a single clever way to do that and ended up with a straightforward, uninteresting caption and what I believe is the worst ad we’ve run since the late 1970’s.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
So, if this lame-o caption was the winner, what in the world did the losers look like?

"You don’t own a 1776-dated colonial note? And you call yourself an American?" didn’t deliver on the concept we had, and said nothing about Milled Dollars, but it was at least provocative. Ultimately, we were so worried that we would offend someone that we decided to scrap it.

In retrospect, I think that was a big mistake. Better to be provocative than to be boring. Right?