July 14, 2008: "The First Gold Coin"

Author:
D. Wnuck

Concept:
Frankly, we don’t think this issue gets anywhere the attention it deserves in the numismatic world. First of all, the reverse design is s-p-e-c-t-a-c-u-l-a-r. Second, the coin is literally the first gold issue of the US mint, which makes it quite significant in our view.

So, we decided to highlight the coin’s august place in American numismatics, and, unusually for us, we showed the reverse in our ad. And it looked pretty cool if we do say so ourselves.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
What at first seemed like an advertising walk-in-the-park quickly turned into a challenge: How could we say that this was the first gold coin produced at the US mint without seeming to make a Contursi-eque claim that this was THE first coin struck? Hmmmm.

Well, we couldn’t use “The first gold coin ever produced at the US mint.", so we tried "The first gold coin ever produced at the US mint was one of these.", but that sounded ridiculous.

Then we tried to backdoor it with "The first gold issue ever produced at the US mint.", but felt that the word ‘issue’ was an issue.

But eventually we arrived at a clever way to insert the word ‘example’ into the caption by posing it as a question. So that’s what we did.