November 2, 2009: "Start Here II"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We had kind of a wacky idea this week and wanted to try something we hadn’t done before by doing something we had already done. Are you with me?

Namely reprising the ‘Start Here’ concept (a line we used just a few months ago in a Continental Dollar ad) because it’s a good one, it’s probably even more relevant to this coin, and we thought people might linger over an ad that sounded oddly familiar to them.

Plus we figured that any guy who calls us to say "Hey, you used that idea before!" is a person most likely to remember our 800 number.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We had an interesting rebus-defining concept suggested by one of customers:

"Sundial [Time] + Fugio [Latin: I Fly] = Time Flies."

But we struggled with how to write (and punctuate) that line in a way that would be very clear to the reader, and ultimately decided that the riskier idea would be more fun.

In retrospect maybe that was the wrong move, but what the heck.