Archive for October, 2009

E-commerce

Posted by marsan in Services on October 27th, 2009

E-commerce

$120 million in annual online sales, thousands of paid subscribers, 65% of transactions online, what more could you want?

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Business models

Posted by marsan in Our accomplishments on October 27th, 2009

Business models

Can web spaces be profitable? Is there a future for newspapers on the web? Of course!

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The agency

Posted by marsan in The agency on October 27th, 2009

Why an interaction agency?

Communication is being redefined around networks and conversations. New technologies are turning practices and media on their heads. Your business strategy and your marketing efforts have to take this into account. We can help.
Why the interaction agency?
Consumers have had it with one-way, institutional communication. They want a dialogue with organizations and their brands. At the same time, social networks, web 2.0, SMS, virtual worlds, smartphones and other interactive spaces are turning the world of marketing and communications on its head. To meet these challenges, VDL2 has become Pheromone, an interaction agency that helps customers harness the power of conversations and networks.
An Internet strategy pioneer recognized for the many successful initiatives of its customers (VIA Rail, RDS, ARTV, Sépaq and others), the agency has extended its interactivity expertise to brand strategy and creation, advancing its vision of a society that revolves increasingly around human interactions, to offers its customers a full range of services to help them take advantage of this new world.
Why Pheromone?
Pheromones are the oldest and most subtle form of communication among living beings, including humans. Scientists have identified different families of pheromones, some of which act as a sort of biological GPS, some of which act as alert systems and others that influence attraction and seduction. All of them are indispensable to the functioning of a community. Similarly, Pheromone delivers different families of services to tackle the business and marketing challenges confronting businesses of today and tomorrow.
Pheromone has a multicultural team of 50 people who work in synergy in over 15 fields. It has honed a dynamic of close collaboration with customers to identify avenues for success, mobilize communities around brands, create spaces for intelligent interaction and inspire emotion, thought and participation.

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Research and development

Posted by arnaud in Our accomplishments on October 27th, 2009

Research and development (R&D)

At Pheromone, some 15 people are dedicated to technological innovation, application development and web hosting.

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News

Posted by arnaud in News on October 27th, 2009

Pheromone is making news

Our interactions with the media: the good news, the not-so-good news, the analyses and, as a bonus, our Quebec e-commerce Stats (the Indice du commerce électronique au Québec).

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The team

Posted by arnaud in Team on October 27th, 2009

The team

Pheromone is a multicultural team of 50 people in over 15 fields of expertise, working together in synergy and in close collaboration with customers.

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Pheromone Lab

Posted by marsan in Pheromone Lab on October 27th, 2009

Phéromone Lab

Our team researches, innovates, learns and finds solutions, debates and expresses its ideas about the web, its technologies and trends. The opinions expressed in this space do not necessarily represent those of the agency or its customers… and so much the better!
Discover our Pheromone lab

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History

Posted by marsan in The agency on October 27th, 2009

History

Launched 15 years ago by Internet pioneers, Pheromone is today one of the 15 largest advertising agencies in Quebec.
In 1994, the Internet emerged from university labs, the Government of Quebec was not yet online, and companies wanted multimedia versions of their brochures. This was the context in which we founded our agency. It was called VDL2 and its mission was to help organizations gain strategic advantage from the Internet. Our mission meant that we had to set concrete objectives for each project, make the Internet central to the strategy for achieving them and develop an obsession for measuring results.
Our first customer was a New York company that we developed a secure e-commerce site for in the fall of 1994. The same year, we made VIA Rail Canada the first railway company in the world to have a home on the web. Its site quickly developed as a model for the industry. Fifteen years later, we are still responsible for e-marketing on its website, which generates over half of its revenues.
In the years that followed, we racked up world and Canadian firsts on the web, in particular for TV5 Québec Canada, a leading channel in Canadian and the top French-language station worldwide, and the Montréal Exchange, the first stock exchange in the world to offer quotes every 15 minutes.
In 1997, the Réseau des Sports (RDS) gave us carte blanche to explore the interactive universe via the web. We decided to design a site that was independent of the TV channel by developing a decidedly community approach, where users produced a large part of the content (what’s known as web 2.0 today). Our efforts quickly made RDS.ca the most visited site in Quebec. Today, with over a billion page views, it surpasses every media site in Quebec and Canada.
In 1999 and 2000, the Cesam, which brings together the world leaders in technology, media and education, entrusted us to develop a number of forecasts on the television, learning and interactive games industries. These reports immediately became an international reference for these industries. It was the first time that our forecasting work went public; until that point it had been solely for our customers.
Given the enthusiasm generated by this publication, we launched «Tendances VDL2», an annual forecast of the impact of the Internet on a number of industries and sectors, accompanied by a fact-based evaluation of how our previous predictions bore out. For ten years, these trends were the economic and media reference both in Quebec and in the rest of the French-speaking world.
In 2001, we developed the Internet strategy for the daily paper Le Devoir, which rapidly became the only North American daily whose Internet activities turn a profit. Today, while the newspaper industry is feeling the effects of the Internet, more and more and press groups are considering a strategy similar to the one we implemented at the time for the Bleury Street daily.
The same year, we moved to the Cité du Multimédia where we inaugurated our new high-availability website operations centre, the result of two years of R&D on emerging technologies in the area of redundancy, load balancing and database management. We became the first web server centre in Quebec to provide an unconditional guarantee of 99% availability and performance for our customers’ websites. Today, our hosting infrastructure combines two redundant server rooms, a content delivery network for cache management and acceleration and a cloud computing infrastructure to delegate specific power needs.
In 2007, our customers chose to make the Internet a major component of their business strategy and asked us to support them in tackling this new challenge. VDL2 quickly grew from 35 to 50 employees and made the move to web 2.0 in terms of its skills, technologies and methods.
In 2009, VDL2 was one of the 15 main advertising agencies in Quebec. On August 27, it became Pheromone, an interaction agency that helps customers harness the power of conversations and networks.

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