It’s not every day you get to turn the nation’s loose change into a high-stakes scavenger hunt, but that’s been the job we’ve been doing with The Royal Mint this week.
For Hope&Glory aficionados, you might know that we worked with the Mint for about eight happy years before we went our separate ways. So it was an especial delight to see them back in the building and get to work on a coin launch once again.
That is how we found ourselves launching “The Penny Drops,” a campaign centred on a limited-edition puzzle coin inspired by the legacy of Sir Isaac Newton which was released last week.
The coin itself is a bit of a masterpiece, covered in cryptic symbols and hidden codes that will release a 250 gramme gold bar to one lucky problem solver.
To land the story, we leaned into the universal British love of a puzzle – we are a nation of crossword solvers and codebreakers, after all – and to get the ball rolling teamed-up with maths wunderkind Bobby Seagull as our unofficial “Codebreaker-in-Chief”.
The beauty of the campaign was watching the internet collectively lose its mind trying to solve the riddles as we moved the “hunt” from the news pages to a dedicated microsite and from there into the nation’s social feeds. We saw everything from serious numismatists to casual puzzle-loving families getting involved.
Watching the story trend across the likes of BBC Breakfast, Sky News, The Sun, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Independent and a tonne of others was a delight to see. But the real win was seeing the “penny drop” for a whole new generation of coin collectors.
