A Diamond Is Forever

Feb 24 2006 - strategy.com

Created by the ad agency N.W. Ayer, the tag line "A Diamond Is Forever" was written in 1948. But the campaign, designed to sell more expensive diamonds, started in earnest in 1939.

In his book The Diamond Invention (Arrow/Random House, 1982), Edward Jay Epstein exhaustively details the story of how the De Beers diamond cartel created demand in the United States for larger, more expensive diamonds through a carefully orchestrated advertising and publicity campaign. In 1939, diamond prices had collapsed in a Europe that was approaching war. In the United States, the diamond engagement ring was already an American tradition, but the size and quality of the diamonds being presented left much to be desired—at least in the opinion of De Beers.

Ayer devised a strategy that was the forerunner of today's "advertainment"—using entertainment as a primary vehicle for product promotion. The agency suggested that diamond engagement rings become a featured attraction in motion pictures; in fact, Ayer said, they wanted to arrange for scenes to be written into movies being produced at the time. Because movie stars represented romantic figures, their fictional presentation of diamond rings as symbols of lasting love would undoubtedly influence mass audiences.

Ayer took the strategy further than movies, placing stories and society photographs about diamonds, creating extravagant ads in elite magazines, and even enlisting Queen Elizabeth to promote the royalty of diamonds.

By 1948, when the copy line "A Diamond Is Forever" appeared, Ayer's campaign had already helped increase the sale of diamonds in the US by 55%. The agency and De Beers continued to innovate. Ayer used the successful movie-placement strategy to again influence programming, this time in a new emerging medium—television. The agency also created a "Diamond Information Bureau" —in essence, a self-serving publicity arm distributing volumes of material about diamonds that wound up in newspapers and magazines.

Today, "A Diamond Is Forever" lives on as the official slogan of the Diamond Trading Company, the De Beers Group's marketing arm. De Beers calls its tag line the "forevermark" (www.forevermark.com). The slogan is still the basis for contemporary campaigns that extol the virtues of diamond engagement rings.

"A Diamond Is Forever" remains an enduring symbol of how an advertising message can have an extraordinary impact on the value people place on an object—and how that value can reflect society's values.