History

Christian Quenneville becomes a partner and associate of m&h. The company signs a partnership agreement with Adobe thanks to its absolute mastery of the integrated tools Workfront, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud. It has now positioned itself as the go-to creative production partner for advertisers looking to produce and distribute large volumes of content. It also offers consulting services for the implementation of Adobe tools, ensuring that advertisers maximize the value of their resources.

Daniel Gendron becomes m&h’s CEO and hands the presidency to Christian Quenneville, who takes the helm of the entity. While the COVID-19 pandemic takes its toll on the outsourcing model, the company still experiences colossal growth under its new president by acquiring several prestigious clients and placing digital transformation at the heart of the company’s growth strategy.

Daniel Gendron buys Yves Langelier’s shares to become the sole owner of m&h. His vision for the company? To no longer be fine with being a commodity company for agencies, dependent on their success, but to distinguish itself by its ability to directly serve major advertisers by acting as an extension or a replacement for their in-house creative studios. This dual role quickly proves valuable in a landscape where the boundaries between creative service providers are increasingly blurred.

In response to a radical change in the marketing and communications industry, m&h makes a major turning point. The multiplication of media channels and diversification of platforms create an unprecedented challenge for advertisers: how to create, produce, and manage a sufficient volume of content and assets to feed these new channels. m&h sees a unique opportunity to reinvent itself from a studio-service company to a nimble creative content production entity, able to fill the gap for a growing need for content. L’Oréal becomes the studio’s first direct client, but many more would follow.

Daniel Gendron and Yves Langelier become owners of m&h after the sudden passing of Peter Marsh. The two partners continue to serve agencies by anticipating technological advances and adding to their range of services to stay one step ahead and better support their clients. The outsourcing model gives new winds to the studio’s sails, with m&h now able to offer both onsite services to meet demands and to call-in other experts as reinforcements during peak periods. The on-demand service proves to be a game-changer for clients, who do not have to worry about calling upon freelancers less familiar with their brands.

m&h positions itself as a power user of Adobe software for creative agencies that place more emphasis on quality — having to do everything on their own, big agencies saw a dip in quality of deliverables and come to appreciate the added value that m&h brings to their creative product. Showcasing attention to detail, graphic precision, prepress technical know-how and other skills, m&h relieves agencies of the technological and training burden and provides top-of-the-line onsite services. Agency creatives can focus on design while m&h takes on production. Win-win.

The Macintosh disrupts the graphic production line industry with a growing consensus in the agency world. The launch of software like Adobe Illustrator (1987), Adobe Photoshop (1988) and QuarkXPress (1987) brings new changes and helps creatives manipulate images, illustrations and texts much more efficiently and intuitively than previous technology. The phototypesetting market is shaken. m&h has to drastically reduce its workforce but manages to hold its own thanks to outsourcing, a model it created by placing its experts in its clients’ studios.

More and more fully Quebec-based advertising agencies are springing up and gaining ground on Toronto agencies with Quebec offices for adaptation. Peter Marsh, ever the visionary, sees this as an opportunity to stand out from his competitors. He offers Daniel Gendron a sales position to develop the Quebec market with Yves Langelier. At the same time, personal computers are becoming a new industry tool without too much upheaval. Throughout, m&h continues to offer phototypesetting and manual assembly of mechanical layouts.

Daniel Gendron, m&h’s current CEO, is hired as messenger as part of a one-year study sabbatical. It’s while shuttling back and forth between the workshop and its client agencies that he discovers an interest in the profession of typographer. He abandons his film studies and over the following four years learns the ropes of phototypesetting and darkroom work.

Peter Marsh launches m&h Typographie. The specialized workshop mainly serves Montreal advertising agencies with an offering of phototypesetting services. In what would become a theme, although all the work is done the traditional analogue way, the company’s equipment is state-of-the-art for its time.