Archive for category The agency
David Rollert
David Rollert
has nearly 30 years of experience with interactive design and UX, beginning in 1981 as a designer and editor at Time Inc in New York where he contributed to an ambitious teletext information system. He was vice president of software development at Lexica Corporation (1984-85), creating PC and videotex applications. Starting in 1985, he was VP and humanware director at Citibank’s development division, where he founded and led Citibank’s central user interface design group. In 1991, he joined Ziff-Davis, where he was design director for a pioneering graphical online service that influenced much early web design. From 1997-2002, he established the worldwide UX practice at the agency Digitas in Boston. From 2002 to 2006, he was VP and design director at Fidelity Investments in Boston, leading major web and financial advice tools design teams. He founded his independent design firm, designtangible, in 2006. Working primarily in Montreal since 2008, he joined Phéromone in November 2009, where he leads the design team.
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.
The team
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.
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.
Mission
Posted by marsan in The agency on October 27th, 2009
The mission
To unleash the power of individuals and organizations by creating inspiring, ingenious and intelligent spaces for interaction.
Society changes. Our world is reorganizing around networks, creating a new balance of power between individuals and organizations. Teenagers are a threat the music industry because they love its products so much, disgruntled consumers have a wider audience than the airline that let them down, Google has become a major international brand without a single advertising campaign.
This is the power of interaction combined with the power of conversations and networks. It’s a form of power that can be yours! And Pheromone can help you unleash it.
We create inspiring, ingenious and intelligent spaces for interaction that mobilize communities around your brand. We help you make customers collaborators. We guide you in exploiting new opportunities.
Web project leader
Web project leader
At Pheromone, you’ll have the chance to work on major projects with customers such as RDS, VIA Rail and ARTV. Reporting to the director of the project management office, your main responsibility will be managing projects in an atmosphere of creativity and innovation. You will control deliverables, schedules and budgets. You will work closely with consultants, team leaders and top-notch professionals. You will manage projects down to the detail level and provide progress reports to management. You will work with project management on planning.
More specifically, you will:
- Participate in the analysis and assessment of customer needs
- Take part in feasibility studies
- Track projects, manage changes to mandates and ensure that progress is documented
- Coordinate the design and drafting of project specifications and proposals
- Coordinate and take part in a variety of production activities, such as scripting, identifying product parameters and budgeting
- Ensure that external suppliers do quality work and follow up with customers after delivery
- Prepare and make presentations to customers using technical and visual tools
- Communicate with team members and ensure that they communicate with each other
Careers
Posted by marsan in The agency on October 27th, 2009
Careers
Your talent has a future at Pheromone. Because of the many sources of talent and the creativity and initiative of the people who make up our team, we get tangible results that ensure our customers’ success and our endurance.
Send us your résumé.
Xavier Vincent
Xavier Vincent, web developer and integrator
With a master’s degree in computer science from the Université d’Aix-Marseille I (2000), Xavier Vincent started his career as a developer analyst with Forum Trafic (Marseilles-Paris logistics chain tracking). From 2006 to 2007, he was a consultant for a Parisian computer services company, Datavance. He then returned to work as a developer analyst at AT Internet (a Bordeaux publisher of audience measurement on XiTi Internet). In April 2008, Xavier became a developer and team manager in Montreal for AT Internet. In July 2009, he joined the Pheromone team. Xavier has mastered many web and programming languages (ASP, ASP.NET, Ajax, C, C# 2, Caml, CSS, JavaScript, JSF 1.1, HTML, PHP, XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath and XSLT) as well as the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005 and Oracle 10g databases.
Martin Vallière
Martin Vallière, senior web developer
A computer graduate from the Collège Ahuntsic (1996), Martin Vallière has been part of VDL2’s interface development team since 1998. An HTML user from the way back and confirmed multimedia designer, Martin has developed many prototypes of interactive applications. He has also spent a number of years researching the combination of programming languages PHP and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a free solution for developing web applications). Key skills include HTML interfaces, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, MySQL, portability and referencing.
Olivier Théreaux
Olivier Théreaux, web architect
With an engineering degree from the École Centrale Paris, Olivier Théreaux started his career in computer security with MasterSecurity (France, 1998-2000). In 2000, he joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Japan, where he created web applications, before turning to improving web standards. Beginning in 2004, Olivier was in charge of free software at W3C, in particular validation services. The same year, he founded the international network Art Beat in Japan, the multilingual websites of which are one of the main sources of information on the arts and design scene from Tokyo to New York. Olivier joined Pheromone in April 2009.
