October 20, 2008:

"Very Small Moose"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
This week we tried to find a clever and impactful way to say that this coin was unusually well struck for the issue. After much consternation, we decided that the tried and true ‘struck like a moose’ numismatic analogy would be nearly ideal for a CW ad.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
There were several, and most of them were not very good. For whatever reason, every time we consider a Half Dime ad we get bogged down in concepts which focus only on the size of the coin, like “Let’s get small.” – Steve Martin, 1977.

I thought that was clever, but was extremely surprised to find out that many people did not understand that this quote referred to a popular 31 year-old comedy album that Martin used to reprise on SNL when I was in high school. After I explained it, they also did not understand why this would be a good ad for a coin, and so we scrapped it.

Next we came up with “Think small.”, which unfortunately says nothing good or interesting about the coin – not to mention that it gets low marks for originality since it ran a while ago as an ad for Mini by BMW. So that was out too.

Then we migrated toward the strike concept with the pedestrian “Half Dime, full strike.” idea before settling on what we believed was the far more memorable moose concept.

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"Very Small Moose"