Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Who She Was
Frances Gerety was a copywriter at the N.W. Ayer advertising agency in Philadelphia, where she worked from 1943 until 1970 and wrote ads for De Beers, a diamond company. In the late 1940s, she was asked to come up with a line for the company’s ads. She wrote “A Diamond Is Forever” late one night and shared it with her coworkers the next morning, and some of them thought it did not really mean anything. De Beers used the line in its ads for decades, and in 1999 the magazine Advertising Age named it the best advertising slogan of the 20th century. She wrote it in her early thirties.
Why She Matters
Gerety’s line is only four words long, yet it became one of the most famous pieces of writing in advertising. It packed a big feeling, love that lasts, into a phrase anyone could remember after hearing it once. Her line became the center of a long-running campaign that tied diamonds to romance and lifelong love. Her story shows that a great line does not have to be fancy, and that an idea some people doubt at first can still be the right one. More than 75 years later, those four words are still widely recognized.
