A diamond is forever

The campaign

In 1938 the De Beers group, which controlled most of the world's rough diamond supply, had a problem of demand. The Depression had cut diamond sales in the United States by more than half, the market for large stones was gone, and the young were not buying engagement rings. Harry Oppenheimer, the son of the chairman, traveled to New York and retained the advertising agency N. W. Ayer to do something about it.

Ayer's research found that the engagement ring was neither universal nor necessarily a diamond, and set out to make it both. The method was a long one. The agency placed diamonds in Hollywood films and arranged for stars to be given them. It supplied stories to newspapers and magazines about the diamonds that celebrities and royalty had received. It commissioned painters, including Picasso and Dalí, to make work for its advertisements, so that the diamond would be associated with art rather than commerce. It sent lecturers to high schools to speak to girls about engagement etiquette. And from 1947 it ran, under the line that a young copywriter named Frances Gerety had written one night, "A Diamond Is Forever", a campaign that argued that a diamond was the only possible token of a lasting marriage and that a man should spend a set fraction of his salary on it. The fraction was one month in the 1930s and two months by the 1980s. It was the agency's invention.

In 1967 De Beers took the method to Japan, through J. Walter Thompson, where the diamond engagement ring was unknown and marriage was arranged. The campaign presented the ring as modern, Western, and romantic. By 1981 more than half of Japanese brides received one.

Who ran it and why

De Beers ran it, through its agencies, and the motive was supply. The cartel held enormous stocks and needed demand to absorb them without a fall in price; it also needed buyers never to sell, since a secondary market would have revealed how little the stones were worth. The campaign therefore sold two things at once: that a diamond was essential, and that it was priceless and should be kept forever. "A Diamond Is Forever" was a sales message and a prohibition.

Gerety worked on the account for her whole career and never married. Edward Jay Epstein's 1982 investigation in The Atlantic, built partly on Ayer's own internal reports, is the main public source for the agency's methods, and the reports are candid: the goal was to create a tradition where none existed and to make the public believe it had always been there.

The techniques, in order of weight

Appeal To Tradition, manufactured. The campaign's central claim was that the diamond ring was the way things had always been done, and within a generation the claim was true, because the campaign had made it so.

Slogan: "A Diamond Is Forever" is among the most durable lines in advertising, and it carried the whole argument, that the stone, the marriage, and the ownership were all permanent.

Transfer: the diamond was placed beside film stars, royalty, fine art, and the idea of eternal love, and took its value from each.

Testimonial through placement: the stars who wore the stones in films and at premieres were endorsing without being quoted, and the gossip columns did the quoting.

Repetition: the same message, in the same words, for fifty years, across every medium, until it was no longer recognized as a message.

Manufactured Consensus: the salary rule, the etiquette lectures, and the magazine features all told the reader what everyone else did, and the reader, having no other source, believed it.

The artifacts

The De Beers campaign is unusual among the cases here in being entirely commercial and entirely open: every advertisement was signed, and the archive reproduces them as advertisements. What makes them propaganda in the sense this site uses is the length of the campaign and the nature of its object, which was not a sale but a belief about the past.

The early Ayer advertisements of the 1940s are the most revealing. They carry reproductions of commissioned paintings, by Dalí, Picasso, Derain, and others, with a small photograph of a diamond and a few lines of copy about love and permanence; the product is almost incidental to the page. The intention was to associate the stone with art and with high culture, and to keep it off the jewellers' pages where it would have been one commodity among others. Later series showed couples at moments of decision, with the copy supplying the rule: the ring is how a man shows he means it, and the size of the stone is the measure. The two-months'-salary advertisements of the 1980s state the rule outright.

The Japanese campaign of 1967 onward, run by J. Walter Thompson, is the control experiment. Its advertisements showed Western couples in Western settings and sold the ring as a sign of modern, companionate marriage, the opposite of the "tradition" being sold in America at the same time. The contrast, visible in the archive, shows that the campaign's frame was chosen for each market and that the custom, in both, was the product.

What happened

The campaign is usually called the most successful in advertising history. The diamond engagement ring went from a minority custom to a near-universal one in the United States by the 1960s, and was exported to Japan, and later to China, by the same methods. De Beers's share of the market has since fallen and synthetic diamonds have undermined the scarcity on which the price rested, but the custom survived its maker: the ring is now defended as tradition by people who have never heard of N. W. Ayer.

Gerety's line was named the slogan of the century by Advertising Age in 1999. Epstein's article, and the books that followed it, made the campaign the standard example of an invented tradition in marketing, and the phrase "manufactured tradition" is often illustrated with it.

The case also shows the limits of exposure as a remedy. Epstein's article was widely read in 1982, has been reprinted and cited for forty years, and is the first result for anyone who asks where the custom came from. The custom is undisturbed. Knowing that a tradition was manufactured turns out to be no bar to keeping it, because the social pressure the campaign created, the expectation of partners, families, and friends, now operates on its own. A technique that succeeds in changing what people expect of each other does not need the campaign any more, and cannot be undone by correcting the record.

What it teaches

The diamond campaign is the case for the manufacture of a custom. The techniques are the ordinary ones of advertising, but they were applied over decades to a single end, and the end was a belief about the past: that this is how it has always been done. The lesson for a reader is that a tradition is a claim about history, and that some claims about history were written by agencies. The question to ask of any "we have always" is who first said so, and what they were selling.