May 3, 2010: "Right-Facing SF"

Author:
C. Sloan

Concept:
It might surprise the reader to know that our guest author actually came up with this ‘personal ad’ idea more than 2 years ago(!), but apparently we were waiting for the exact right time to unleash it. Which turned out to be this week.

Because even though it was, in our opinion, a delightfully clever idea (certainly enough so to use in a CRO ad), we knew it needed a carefully matched coin and caption to be interesting and, importantly, understandable.

A combination we believe was achieved with this caption which made it clear that SF meant Single Female, as in the depiction of Miss Liberty on this lovely early Half Cent.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We knew we were going to go with this basic idea, though the original version ended with ". . . SF seeks collector for passionate gazes and occasional bank vault trysts." But that sounded significantly too racy for an ad in a collectibles publication.

And we also considered alternative modifiers of ‘SF’, including diminutive, as in "Diminutive SF seeks . . .". But that didn’t make it obvious enough that we were referring to the SF on the featured coin.

So we went with the most descriptive option we could combined with the purely numismatic ending. And we liked it.