Picture: Kris Cotner

As all of you are no doubt aware, today is the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans and brought down New York City’s Twin Towers. To say that this event fundamentally changed America is an understatement, as everything from business practices to foreign policy were altered.

The destruction of the Twin Towers, an iconic American monument, also presented serious problems for marketers who used the towers as a backdrop for new vehicles. As Hooniverse points out, the 2002 Ford Mustang brochure utilized an image of a stoplight in front of the Twin Towers, which was delivered to dealers just weeks or days before the attack.

Though ultimately trivial in the grand scheme of things, Ford did not want to be reminding people of the 9/11 attacks while they’re looking through a pamphlet for a new Mustang or the higher-volume Focus that it shared pages with. The image was originally meant to invoke style, speed, and the overall grandness of these two vehicles. Instead, Ford hastily recalled the brochures, replacing the cover with a stock image of some “friends having fun” in the hopes of appealing to the youthful demographic.

Today these brochures are rare to come by, most having no doubt been destroyed. Still, a few survive, a testament to a pre-9/11 world that was somehow more innocent and less troubling than the one we live in today. That said, we can’t help but wonder what these rare brochures might fetch on an auction site like eBay.