Everyone in this business has a pile like this.  Ad concepts that, for one reason or another, were never produced. The light bulb went on, only to be shattered later. It comes with the territory.

And it happens for a number of reasons:

I worked on an ad campaign for a floppy disk (remember those?). The  manufacturer claimed to be the only one that inspected 100% of each disk’s surface. My campaign was about to be produced—then the company told us that, oops, they didn’t actually inspect the whole disk after all. Bye bye, differentiator—and bye bye, campaign.

I wrote an ad for Rockwell International, who wanted to spotlight their heritage of successful military aircraft. My headline was “Our Roots Are In The Sky.” Nice…except that my creative director insisted on creating a layout that showed a forest of upside-down trees, floating in the sky, roots-up!  Naturally, the client killed it, but it lives on, right here.