New NDC Campaign Spotlights Canada’s Diamond Industry

The National Diamond Council (NDC) has unveiled an advertising campaign that emphasizes Canada’s importance to the industry, offering retailers a new angle for selling the diamond story to consumers. 

The ads — under the tagline “Real. Rare. Responsible” — follow actress and NDC global ambassador Lily James on her recent trip to Canada’s Northwest Territories, home to diamond mines and manufacturing units, the marketing organization said Thursday.  

Video and images will guide viewers through James’s visit to De Beers’ Gahcho Kué mine; Rio Tinto’s splitting facility in Yellowknife; manufacturer Diamonds de Canada, which produces diamonds under the government’s Polar Bear mark; and the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. 

The campaign will launch September 9, NDC executives told Rapaport News last week ahead of the JCK Las Vegas trade show.  

A fresh perspective 

James has been the NDC’s global ambassador for two years. In late 2022, she embarked on a trip to Botswana that led to an ad campaign about the positive aspects of the African country’s diamond sector. 

“She was super-engaged with it and actually said to us, ‘We’d love to do more of these,’” NDC CEO David Kellie related in an interview Wednesday in Las Vegas. 

This resulted in James and the NDC team visiting the frosty Northwest Territories in February 2024 to shoot the ads. It was originally planned for the more temperate weather of August 2023, but wildfires delayed the shoot. 

Botswana and Canada are “poles apart in terms of climate, people, cultures, language and everything, and yet the values of the diamond industry…are identical,” Kellie reflected. “It’s really interesting when you’re writing the text and the narrative — it’s the same except for the name of the region.” 

The Canadian campaign gives retailers another point of reference to convey the positive impact of diamonds to consumers, highlighting the country as a sustainable source where the diamond trade benefits the local community. 

“In North America, there’s a lack of awareness that diamonds are also coming from Canada,” Kellie pointed out. “And obviously there’s a very close association between the US and Canada. So the second part of it was to bring attention” to Canada as a diamond source. 

While the ads will break in time for the 2024 holiday season, Kellie hopes they will be “timeless” like the Botswana iterations, which the organization is still running. “It will be an evergreen campaign for us,” he said. 

The NDC’s global retail partners — including stores in the US and Asia — will also push the campaign. 

Financial crunch 

While Kellie declined to say how much the campaign cost, he acknowledged that the NDC had yet to close the funding gap that Alrosa left when it exited over the Russia-Ukraine war. 

In fact, the cash shortfall has worsened due to the drop in the remaining members’ sales in last year’s diamond-market downturn. The contributions from the miners that form the NDC are linked to their revenue. 

The addition of Okavango Diamond Company (ODC) as the NDC’s first non-mining member has partly compensated for the recent slowdown. So has a partnership with India’s Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), explained Richa Singh, the NDC’s managing director for India and the Middle East. Ten additional partners — most recently Indian diamond manufacturer Aurostar — pay a flat fee in return for access to marketing materials.  

India’s financial contribution to the NDC — from the GJEPC and manufacturers — comes to around 10% of the total, the executives said. 

Reaching the trade’s potential 

Despite all of this, the industry still lacks the resources to do more of the marketing it needs, Kellie argued.  

“Diamonds are the most beautiful, imaginative product to be able to market,” he asserted. “Consumers love diamonds. The engagement we get on our campaigns, on our social media, is super high. For us, the frustration is that the potential is all there for the industry, for natural diamonds. But unless we can figure out as an industry how we are going to resource that collectively, fairly, such that no one feels that they’re making an unreasonable contribution…we’re not going to reach anything like our potential.” 

As the post-lockdown jewelry boom showed, according to Kellie, the industry’s internal challenges disappear when consumer demand is strong. 

“There’s only one problem, and that’s consumers buying enough diamonds,” he stated. “As we saw during Covid-19, when the consumer buys diamonds, all the other problems don’t exist. The only thing that matters in this industry is consumer desire for natural diamonds. And yet, in most people’s discussions, it is not high enough on the priority list for them.” 

Image: Lily James in the NDC campaign. (Natural Diamond Council)