Despite the fact that they represent a significant part of the daily consumption of media programming, there are no particular statutes for preserving and safeguarding advertising announcements, even though their contents sometimes have a marked influence on social, cultural and economic issues.

 This organization is the only one of its kind in Canada which is concerned with collecting and gathering the many productions of advertising which form an important component of the daily culture for Canadian men and women. 

 If it was not for the effort and enthusiasm of this organization which is concerned with recovering and indexing these “ad inventories spread through the industry, there would remain only little traces of these productions.

- Extract from  cross-Canadian research on archiving. The trust for the safeguarding of audio-visual elements,  Department of Canadian Heritage

What is the Centre d'Archives Publicitaires?

The mission of the organization

To become the advertising record

• by archiving all audio, video and films
• by digitizing and making available on an Internet site this record of the advertising history of Quebec
• by providing the material being used by the advertising industry to institutions of learning, and other distribution channels.  

Person in charge

• Pierre Savard, director and archivist. Founder.  Pierre is a professional with 40 years of production experience in the advertising medium.

Assets

• A computerized data base for research
• More than 30,000 advertisements, on various mounts, stored in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Québécoise
• A second database of awards given by the Publicity Club of Montreal for the last 45 years.

The work of filing undertaken several years ago to index the thousands of advertisements which exist, must intensify in order to save examples of messages considered out-of-date.

Stored under not very satisfactory conditions, many tapes need to be recovered and placed in the archives so that these ads will be accessible, for years to come, to anyone wishing to consult this heritage.

The Centre d'Archives Publicitaires already meets requests from education centres, producers, distributors and other communications craftsmen.

Storage Services offered The management of fragile archives under optimum conditions for treatment and conservation. Vaults at controlled temperature protected by a security system, reserved exclusively for the storage of films and videotape. Inventory, classification and production of a computerized list of the material deposited.

Services for archive research

• Research
• Transfer or duplication on all formats
• Sequential Assembly
• Digitalization on DVD (Tariff Grid on request)

Guarantee Policy

The Centre d'Archives Publicitaires recognizes that advertising creations are the property of the agencies and/or of their customers present or passed and consequently any use of the material must be approved by the holders of the intellectual rights.  These people are able, in any time, to withdraw or add material to their deposit in vault. 

Contact

Pierre Savard 
Archivist
Centre d'Archives Publicitaires
psav@videotron.ca
1-255, rue l'Espérance
St-Lambert (Québec)
J4P 1Y3
514.952.3197

 N.B.: The Centre d'Archives Publicitaires is presently waiting for its incorporation under the Quebec Companies Law and its status as a non-profit corporation.