April 7, 2008: "The Only One Left"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We liked this as a classic double-take inducing caption which seemed like it meant one thing, but actually meant something else entirely – highlighting the interesting (to us) fact that this is the only early US copper coin in which Lady Liberty is looking to her left.

How come? No idea.

Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same; this is a classic one-year type coin that everybody wants.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
There were only two alternatives this week:

"Start your type set right here.” was similar to a caption we considered using a few weeks ago in the Fugio ad. The idea being that ‘right here’ meant both ‘with this coin’, and ‘with CRO’. We rejected it then because we thought it sounded too commercial, and it seemed even less charming in this pedestrian iteration.

Which left us with the eventual winner, but not before some angst over the exact wording. We briefly tried "Among US copper coins, this is the only one left.", but felt that the choppy words after the comma killed the rhythm. And so we killed this version.