March 14, 2011: "The First Appearance"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We figured it was about time we did a serious, historical, factual, yet still interesting caption which pointed out something significant about a coin that a lot of our readers may not have previously known.

Also, we like to occasionally show the reverse of a coin in our ads, and this seemed like an opportune time.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
We knew we would be going with this basic premise, but began with the more concise "The First Appearance of the Word CENT on a U.S. Coin."

But, for emphasis, and symmetry (and because we are absolutely obsessed with making these ads as good as we can), we thought it was important that the word "Cent" appear as close as possible to the middle of the second line, which required us to make the whole caption longer.

And so, after some very serious consideration, advanced computer modeling and extensive focus group testing, we stuck a "This is . . ." at the beginning of it.