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It’s one of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history: Marilyn Monroe, shimmying in a hot-pink dress on a blood-red soundstage, flanked by unsuitable suitors in tailcoats, singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” while wearing an amount of jewelry that almost seems sarcastic. In 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Monroe’s charisma and cultural influence are at their peak, and it’s difficult to take your eyes off her and her flawlessly sparkling (and impeccably lit) diamonds as she flits around the stage, name-checking Tiffany and Cartier and advising a bevy of maiden backup dancers that diamonds will never do them wrong. The performance is so influential that an homage to it—Madonna’s 1985 video for “Material Girl”—is a legendary pop-culture artifact in its own right. The scene, perhaps the most famous in Monroe’s career, was also what we might now call “product placement” or “sponsored content.”
When the movie came out and for decades afterward, the diamond industry’s full-court press on mass media was unknown to the general public. In his 1982 Atlantic feature, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?,” the journalist Edward Jay Epstein outlines what he describes as “the diamond invention.” Following the discovery of huge diamond deposits in South Africa at the end of the 19th century, the diamond industry had a problem on its hands: The British financiers who had underwritten the development of the mine had been a little too successful in their pursuit of the previously rare stones, and they suddenly had far more than they needed to satisfy existing demand. Diamonds were no longer rare at all, and that meant that they weren’t necessarily worth—and didn’t necessarily mean—much of anything.
The first step in solving that problem was the creation of the De Beers Corporation, a price-fixing cartel that brought the world’s supply of diamonds under its control. But ensuring that diamond prices stayed high didn’t itself induce demand for the stones; as the Great Depression drew to a close, it was clear that for the market to expand enough to make expansive mining operations continually profitable investments, regular people had to be made to yearn for a diamond of their own. The human tendency to imbue objects with meaning long predates the advent of the modern consumer system, and the meaning of the diamond needed to be changed. “We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology,” said a 1947 report authored by De Beers’s American advertising agency N. W. Ayer.
Epstein’s detailed account of what is arguably the most successful corporate-marketing campaign of all time is a landmark piece of consumer journalism, and it offers a glimpse inside a playbook that is still widely used to sell products today. De Beers hired Ayer to turn the diamond into a symbol of eternal love, with the intention of not just putting a diamond ring on more fingers, but ensuring that it would be seen as gauche and unromantic for consumers to resell theirs; with no significant secondary market, the cartel’s singular grip on the global supply would be maintained. When mines were mostly producing larger diamonds, their campaigns emphasized engagement rings, and karat weight was the primary marker of a good diamond. When De Beers partnered with the Soviets on a Siberian mine that produced tons of small diamonds, marketers invented the eternity band, and campaigns shifted to encourage shoppers to prioritize clarity and cut over size. Men, too, had to be trained to buy diamonds, without knowing whether their female partner might actually want one—no matter its specs, the best diamond is a surprise.
Some of the most powerful tools of the diamond invention, though, were indirect. The cartel’s ad agency flooded Hollywood with jewelry and fed information on stars’ gems to gossip columnists and newspaper reporters. It got diamonds in front of film cameras and on the hands of carefully posed starlets in fan magazines. As Hollywood grew in size and influence—first through movie theaters, then via television—so did its capacity to set cultural expectations. Ad campaigns alone don’t have the power to embed a durable new idea into old cultural norms. Marilyn Monroe did.
