Introduction

It takes a pretty shocking ad to stop me in my tracks. After 15 years of writing about marketing and advertising for the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and the New York Times, I have become mostly immune to marketing's siren song. But as I flipped through the pages of Vanity Fair, I did a double take.

“The left hand rocks the cradle. The right hand rules the world.”

In those two simple sentences I saw a view of women I had not seen before in advertising. Here was a company—DeBeers diamonds, surprisingly enough—that had the guts to openly talk about what women were still struggling to understand and embrace.

It attacked head-on the misconception held by many marketers—and indeed many women—that women were caught in a struggle to choose ...

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