“I love a good puzzle,” adds Golden, the former publisher of Adage, whose held marketing roles at NBC, Xerox and AT&T. “And when you look at all the pieces on the table, they were, frankly, a marketer’s dream.”

And even as Quad strives to be a full-service marketing agency, the catalogue, in-store and direct mail business continues to chug on.

“We’re not trying to be the end-all of the marketing world,” Quadracci says. “We’re makers. It’s a maker culture. It’s taking hard stuff and making it simple.”