Eight independent agencies, one holding company named after the police motto and a founding philosophy built around inverting the pyramid. The Humanise Collective thinks the agency industry has been eating its own for long enough.
There is a moment in almost every agency founder’s story where the dream and the machine stop pointing in the same direction. The business grows, the pyramid builds itself beneath you and one day, you look up from a shareholder call and realize that the thing you built to do great work has become a thing that does great work in order to feed itself.
Sébastien Fauré has watched it happen to enough people that he gave his holding company a name specifically designed to remind everyone what the alternative looks like: Gestion Police Inc (ie, Police Management in French). As in, to serve and protect.
Fauré and co-founder Jean-Sébastien Monty invented the Humanise Collective in Montreal initially out of frustration and eventually out of conviction. They had both come up through Cossette, the dominant Canadian agency of their era, lost touch, then found each other on a beach in Hawaii. By the time they sat down for supper at Fauré’s place, the idea that had been forming for years finally had two people willing to build it.
The insight was simple. Independent agencies in secondary markets were always finishing fourth in big national and international pitches. Good enough to be considered, not quite enough to win. The founders running those shops faced a choice that was not really a choice: sell to a holding company and get the infrastructure, or stay independent and stay underpowered. Monty and Fauré thought there was a third option.
What they built is now eight agencies, around 275 people, across Montreal, Toronto, Paris and Singapore. But the structure is not what makes it interesting.
In a conventional holding company, resources, decisions and margins flow downward and what moves back up is revenue. The agencies exist to feed the structure. Humanise runs the other way. Shared services, banking relationships, cash flow support when a studio has just won a big account and needs to staff up in two weeks. The founders are freed to lead.
What that produces is a group of agency leaders who have stayed hungry. Sarah Thompson, who runs Glassroom’s Toronto office, the Collective’s media agency, describes joining as a rebellion against the holdco mentality. She was formerly president of Dentsu Media for Canada. She knew what she was walking away from. At Glassroom, her team can tell a client the truth about what is happening with their money rather than defaulting to a predetermined allocation split negotiated at network level. A $4m dollar media plan in Canada typically involves around 10 media partners. On the 988 Suicide Crisis Line campaign, Glassroom used over 60, going as granular as Yellowknife radio stations and print in languages the national-scale plan would never have reached. Craft, in other words, and it costs something to insist on it when the easier path is always available.
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Shane Ogilvie at The Garden, named best small agency in Canada last year, quit a comfortable executive job in 2014 because he kept watching agencies apply what he calls Mad Men solutions to problems that had genuinely changed shape. He and his partner, Shari Walczak, launched without a client, built the agency on flat fees against outputs rather than hourly billing and spent a decade being told that was not how things were done. Every shop is now trying to figure out how to do the same thing.
Marie-Claude Lachance at Bleublancrouge, independent since 1983 and among the oldest agencies in Quebec, is now pitching CEOs and CFOs rather than marketing VPs, billing on strategic value rather than production hours. Clients that already have in-house creative teams, she argues, do not need another agency. They need a perspective they cannot generate from inside.
The thread running through every conversation is generosity, though not the kind that comes easily. Monty makes the distinction carefully. Giving something up when you have just enough, referring a client elsewhere when their budget could plausibly have stayed with you, is a different act from generosity out of surplus. Several people have left the Collective because that distinction proved impossible to live by. The ones who remain have internalized it to the point where it no longer feels like discipline.
This is what separates Humanise from the independent networks that preceded it. Monty watched those models operate. The problem was always the same: everyone agreed in principle and then kept the best work for themselves. Humanise solved it not through goodwill but through structure. Majority ownership sits with the two founders; the agencies are financially tied together and the shared services model means the holding company is genuinely useful rather than extractive.
The current ambition takes the logic further. There are roughly 30,000 independent creative businesses across North America whose founders are approaching the end of their working lives, with no exit and no successor who can afford to buy them out. Humanise is working toward becoming a stewardship vehicle for that generation, acquiring before businesses go on the market, when the energy is still intact, and handing them forward at a higher platform than they started.
Fauré has a line about the collective’s high and low cycles worth holding on to. When you are on a high, you pull everyone up. When you are low, you slow the fall. It is the most precise description of what a genuine collective does, as opposed to what most of them claim to do.
One final detail. L’Institut Idées, the collective’s unconventional consulting arm, runs a proprietary methodology that maps the emotional drivers behind any organization’s success, reached through a structured process that never once asks anyone what they think or what they want. 12 years ago, when Fauré had the idea for the collective but not yet its shape, it ran one of its maps on it. The name Humanise came out of that process.