The early days of advertising in Quebec were vastly different than today. Though the province represented a large portion of the Canadian market in the first decades of the 20th century, the anglo-centric business community was loath to deal with French businesses-agencies included.
Into this environment stepped Francois Emile Fontaine (above), who founded what many believe to be the first true French-Canadian agency in 1908, the same year Marketing was introduced. While other francophones had successfully started agencies in Montreal (notably Desbarats Advertising), Fontaine’s Canadian Advertising Agency was the first to have an entirely francophone staff.
Fontaine began his career selling space for Le Monde, a French-language daily in Montreal, but launched his agency with an English name to meet the business community halfway.
It wasn’t an easy business model to maintain since most of Fontaine’s work was translating English ads for Quebec newspapers. In his book Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising, Russell Johnston points out that Fontaine had the same production costs as other agencies, but a smaller market in which to place the work. But by developing clients in every province, and occasionally branching into the U.S. (one American client was Champion spark plugs of Toledo, Ohio), the agency was successful enough to survive Fontaine’s death in 1932 as well as the Great Depression. By 1958, Canadian Advertising Agency had satellite offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Paris, and an impressively long list of clients including Canadian National Railways, Sifto Salt, Coty Canada and Air France.
The agency’s demise is somewhat unclear. Johnston says it changed its name to L’agence Canadienne de Publicite in 1962. In an article published in 2001, Claude Cossette, founder of Cossette Communication-Marketing, says Fontaine’s agency vanished in 1974. In fact, in August of that year, Marketing reported that the Canadian Advertising Agency was to be absorbed by another agency, Groupe des Communicateurs du Vieux Montreal. Canada’s first all-francophone agency passed quietly after 66 years.
