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The purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals, so-called advertising technicians and the knowledge they acquired. Examining correspondence courses in the technology of advertising, we focus particularly on the production of technified knowledge and mass personas.

The study is based on a qualitative analysis of course material from Sweden’s two largest correspondence schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis: the concept of market devices and the notion of personas, both of which we use to show how the courses crafted a particular kind of advertising professional as well as knowledge.

The study shows that courses created a template-based persona of the advertising technician, who possessed what we call bounded originality characterized by diligence, modesty and rule-governed creative imagination. Similarly, the courses created a body of knowledge that was controllable and highly practice-oriented. The advertising technician was expected to embody and internalize the advertising knowledge, thus, becoming an extension of this knowledge on the market.

By directing the searchlight at the cadre of ordinary, middle-class advertising professionals instead of the high-profile “advertising creatives” and innovators, the paper brings to the foreground the nonelite level of the advertising industry. These practitioners went to work in the business world to produce the everyday advertising that was not necessarily groundbreaking but was needed in a growing mass-consumption society.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how the cartelized Swedish advertising industry contributed to the development of brands in Sweden in the early twentieth century. Specifically, a nationwide campaign for branded goods in 1925 is studied.

The paper is based on a study of primary sources from the Swedish advertising agencies, manufacturers and retailers, which are analyzed using a hermeneutic method.

The paper shows that the unique organization of the main Swedish advertising agencies and the limited size of the market pushed the agencies into promoting and selling the idea of brands to consumers, retailers and manufacturers, which was done by exploiting established social sentiments in combination with American advertising techniques. It is also found that the Swedish advertising agencies described and conceptualized brands using widely known social ideals rather than the so-called brand personality aspect of branding.

Although limited to the Swedish case, this paper suggests that research could benefit from taking different markets’ unique contexts into more consideration when studying the development of brands and advertising. In this paper, especially the organization and size of the advertising market together with the specific social and cultural values available to advertising professionals when creating brands, have been highlighted.

The paper emphasizes the size of the advertising market together with the organization of the advertising industry as important factors for the historical development of brands in Sweden. It also shows how brands were conceptualized using social ideals rather than the brand personality aspect of branding.

By studying the marketing of advertising space, this paper aims to study how class, gender and region were portrayed in terms of economic considerations in adverts selling advertising space to potential advertisers. The paper studies how readers were discursively transformed into consumers in this material and how different consumer groups were depicted, divided and framed during Sweden’s early consumer culture. By doing so, the paper highlights the tensions between aiming at a mass audience, on the one hand, and striving to reach more and more specific consumer groups on the other hand.

Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are made in order to follow the changes of highlighted consumer groups in the ads. Intersectional analysis is used to see how notions of class and gender intersected during the analysed period.

The sectioning of the press is in the paper stressed as a prerequisite for market segmentation and the economic history of mass media is lifted as essential for understanding it. The gendering and classing of market segments were also based on how common interests were interpreted by political movements and their press forums. For surviving in the long run, however, the paper argues that the political press needed to commercialise their readerships to attract advertisers and survive economically.

The paper concludes that mass marketing and segmentation processes were in many senses parallel in the studied material. Statements of reaching all social classes diminished over time, but notions of the masses were prevalent in both the worker and the women categories. However, how advertisers choose between different media for their advertising campaigns or how they adopted different marketing methods towards different segments are beyond the scope of this paper.