Doug Ashbury
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 28/99) - Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce members are among the first to catch a glimpse of De Beers' multi-million dollar millennium marketing campaign.

In the coming months, De Beers, which markets 70 per cent of the world's diamonds through the Central Selling Organization, will marry the year 2000 with the diamond.

In the final three months of 1999, De Beers will spend 40 per cent of its annual marketing budget on its millennium advertising. For 1999, De Beers has budgeted about $175 million US for marketing.

Slogans like "show her you love her for the next thousand years" and "what are you waiting for, the year 3000?" will be on television, in print and at various other avenues.

De Beers will stress the "durability" of diamonds and the "meaning" of the occasion, De Beers' marketing director Mary Walsh said.

Diamonds will be shown as a "symbol as opposed to a souvenir," she said.

Walsh and Tom Beardmore-Gray, senior vice-president of De Beers Canada, spoke Wednesday at a Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Explorer Hotel.

Over the next eight months, De Beers will promote diamonds as a way for people to mark the millennium. In the year 2000, the marketing will then shift to diamonds as a way for individuals to celebrate anniversaries, birthdays and other occasions during the year. Because of their buoyant economies, North America and Europe will be De Beers' target markets.

In these markets in the year 2000, Walsh said there will be seven million engagements, 28 million weddings, 69 million births and 880 million anniversaries. If just one in 200 among this group buys a diamond to mark the occasion, world diamond sales will jump 10 per cent, she said.