November 15, 2010: "Ye Olde Money"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
It occurred to me the other day that while we have featured Pine Tree coinage several times in our ads through the years, we have always shown the ‘tree side’, while pretty much ignoring the giant date on the reverse indicating that these coins are extremely old. Which struck me as unfortunate, since in our experience, coin collectors (and, in fact, people in general) like things that are extremely old. Hence this ad highlighting (through the reverse image and the caption) the 350 or so years this coin has seen in its very long life.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Prior to my epiphany about the age of these coins, we were about to show the obverse with the caption “Rooted in History.” (which I frankly thought was very clever and will almost certainly appear in another ad sometime soon). But for this week, we definitely wanted to focus on age, first with the historical narrative “Minted in Boston just 30 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.” But we concluded that that lacked pizazz, and was just too long. So we settled on the short and sweet caption in our final ad.