M&H’s work for Armani’s Acqua di Giò fragence featured bold photography and the new faces of Generation Armani to an impactful OOH execution at Dundas Square in Toronto.
M&H had humble beginnings. As a Montreal-based typesetter, a behind-the-scenes wizard offering project management, design and creative, digital graphic production and all the other studio services that agencies often outsourced.
But, as the company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, it’s evolved into something greater than the sum of its parts. Operating as a clutch partner in a cluttered mediascape, M&H fills the void where traditional agencies stop and vendors start. “We’re sort of a non-agency,” jokes M&H president Christian Quenneville.
The turning point for M&H began in 2005 when the marketing landscape started to shift. The proliferation of media channels made it challenging for advertisers and agencies to create and manage the vast amounts of content required to feed the growing beasts. M&H saw the opportunity and evolved to become a bespoke creative entity positioned to satisfy that need. Now, the majority of the firm’s clients are direct advertisers – either as an alternative to an in-house studio or complementary to it – a nice complement to the work they still do for their partner agencies.
A whole new brand identity was developed in- house by M&H for non-profit Mère avec Pouvoir to help their efforts to raise money and support low-income single mothers.
Quenneville says his team takes pride in being craftspeople: they don’t create initial brand concepts or strategic plans, but instead excel at distilling and expressing those brands across digital, video, print and out-of-home.
“Where we shine is efficiency, speed of content and creative control as you’re deploying your brand on multiple platforms,” he notes. “And that resonates with a lot of large advertisers.”
It must. The last two years have seen M&H double its business and grow to 165 employees. Quenneville describes M&H as operating in the velocity, quality and volume-centric game, focused on driving efficiency within ever-expanding media channels. For this “non-agency,” that means removing as many sources of friction from the process as possible and leveraging marketing technologies to make things run smoothly.
In collaboration with Sid Lee, M&H produced OOH, social and print assets to communicate how Rogers connects Canadians and is “With You All the Way”.
For example, consider that M&H produced over 100,000 different pieces of content and assets for client L’Oreal last year alone. “At that scale,” Quenneville says, “technology is a friend both to the client and to us, allowing us to deliver quality at the velocity that’s expected in 2023.
“At this point, most advertisers we speak to and most agency partners have invested in some form of marketing tech stack, but have yet to fully leverage it within our sphere of deliverables. There are huge gains to be made there.”
M&H can leverage an extensive set of creative and organizational tools (like Workfront or the Adobe Creative Suite), as well as automation tools (like Dynamic Creative Optimisation [DCO] and Digital Creative Automation [DCA]), to get a volume of targeted work out the door within 12-to-24 hours.
That’s probably why clients like L’Oreal, BRP (Bombardier Recreational Products) and Rogers have chosen to work with M&H. Despite operating in distinct categories, all three work in very competitive retail environments in which they must react to competitive and market offers on a regional basis.
M&H collaborated with Sid Lee to roll out the Circular Design for Fashion book on behalf of The Ellen Macarthur Foundation featuring vibrant colours and an embossed cover to align with the goal of redefining the future of fashion.
“With all the channels that we have to work with and leverage these days, it’s about message adaptation and localization,” he says. “You’re regionalizing everything. You’re not only adapting for language, you’re adapting for locale, competitive set and sales results in any given market. If you think about it as a matrix, it has gotten to be significantly more complex. We find that, with the use of technology, great creative going straight to market can be complex, but not complicated.”
In short, this means M&H is happy to leave the strategy to others and find new and better ways to get creative.
“We’re experts in managing the creative production process,” says Quenneville. “We’re really good at harnessing marketing technology. But ultimately, it’s about delivering quality creative scale, and that’s what we do. It’s that simple. But, it’s different from what our agency partners do.
“I don’t think the creative production process is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about a creative agency,” he adds. “But it is for us. We’re experts at managing the process and harnessing marketing technology, all in the service of driving quality creative at scale.”
CONTACT:
Dave Nourse
Vice-president, growth
dnourse@mh.ca
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