History

Launched 15 years ago by Internet pioneers, Pheromone is today one of the 10 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 10 main advertising agencies in Quebec. On August 27, it became Pheromone, an interaction agency that helps customers harness the power of conversations and networks.