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A d v e r t i s e m e n t
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Stefan Schwarzkopf
| HAT REGULAR WINS DISSERTATION PRIZE
Dr. Stefan Schwarzkopf has been a regular visitor to HAT Archive since 2001, scouring our collections for evidence of the forgotten heyday of British advertising during the interwar years. In his PhD thesis, submitted at Birkbeck College London, Stefan focused on the emergence of a service and consumer-oriented advertising industry in Britain between 1900 and 1940.
During these years, large agencies emerged like W. S. Crawford and the London Press Exchange, but they had to face stiff competition as American agencies like J. Walter Thompson, Lord & Thomas, and McCann Erickson entered the British market. What’s more, the industry operated in an often hostile cultural climate. It is not surprising therefore that industry and professional bodies like the Advertising Association and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising staged large-scale advertising exhibitions and organized advertising campaigns to promote the industry to ordinary consumers. Stefan’s thesis has shown that this quest for professional legitimacy was largely successful and influenced the structures of agency competition for clients and consumers: what had been a conglomeration of advertising space salesmen in 1900 became an efficient and competitive service industry some forty years later.
Stefan says: ‘The collections of the various groups representing the industry and the agency collections were invaluable for my research. My regular visits to HAT helped me to gather historical evidence which will make a real difference to how we understand Britain’s cultural and commercial past’.
We’re happy to report that in 2009, Stefan’s thesis won the prestigious Coleman Prize for the best dissertation in British business history. The Prize was awarded by the Association of Business Historians at their annual meeting in Liverpool. Stefan has now taken up a post as Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and can be contacted at: ssc.lpf@cbs.dk.
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