The year is 2013 and Chaka Sobhani, creative director at ITV Creative, is looking for a job.
And so she finds herself at the Biscuit Building in Shoreditch waiting to see Mother founder Robert Saville. Downstairs, the Gallery at Mother is bustling with activity. Beautiful photographs adorn the walls. As Sobhani walks through the space she notices all the images are of naked women. Or – more specifically – of their “lady gardens”.
“And I was like, ‘I like this’,” Sobhani, now global chief creative officer at Leo Burnett, recalls.
The photos were part of Project Bush, an initiative created by Mother staffers with The Feminist Times (the short-lived successor to Spare Rib) as a call to action. Why should women’s pubic hair conform to a porn star aesthetic? An exhibition of 93 differently maintained – and not – pubis and labia pushed against that. If the brief had been to encapsulate Mother in an exhibition, the answer couldn’t have been more appropriate. An edgy idea with a purpose that was made to happen, just because.
But back to that morning in 2013. Sobhani walked out of her chat with Saville “absolutely buzzing”. And, after another lengthy meeting – covering film, cinema and art – with Mother partner Mark Waites, she was in.
Creative breeding ground
Reflecting on the experience as Mother prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary (like all good love stories, there is a debate over when it actually is), Sobhani says there wasn’t some grand plan behind her switch in career. She didn’t search out quirky Mother in order to move into advertising from her already successful stint in TV. She says she was just “really lucky” to get the call to go in to see them.
“In the year 2021, people are much more open to you not having the traditional trajectory but when I went to meet Mother that was not the case,” Sobhani, who left Mother to join Leo Burnett London in 2016, explains. “I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think any other agency would have hired me. I don’t mean that presumptively, what I mean is they have always had the ability to spot potentially interesting people and bring them in, because their definition of creativity isn’t restricted to advertising.”
As someone who worked at Mother and now has a major role somewhere else, Sobhani is hardly a rare species. In fact, like the rats that inspired Mother’s comic in 2008, you can hardly move for the agency’s alumni among London’s CCOs.
When Mother opened it did things very differently from adland’s establishment. Twenty-five years later, the creatives that learned to break the rules at Mother are now running creative departments at countless agencies.
In addition to Leo Burnett, creative leaders at Creature London, Droga5 London, Lucky Generals, McCann London, Sunshine, TBWA\London, The & Partnership, Uncommon Creative Studio and VCCP have previously worked at Mother. And that’s before you get to directors such as Kim Gehrig and Juan Cabral. Or Caroline Pay, currently chief creative officer at Headspace.
So, as Mother celebrates its quarter century, Campaign spent some time with this illustrious agency to try to find out what its secret is.
It starts, as with most things at Mother, with Saville. The osmotic benefit of working alongside one of the greatest talents in advertising should not be underestimated. In separate conversations with Campaign, Andy Jex, chief creative officer at TBWA\London, and Stu Outhwaite-Noel, chief creative officer at Creature London, both describe Saville as the industry’s “best account man, best strategist and best creative”.
“He shapes the people under him to be a bit like that,” Outhwaite-Noel says. “Which is why you have so many great leaders coming out of Mother because you have people who are smarter than just being able to write 60-second ads.”
Ad people telling you that answer isn’t always advertising is endemic these days. But Mother created a helpline for young people looking for information about drugs from a brief for a TV ad in 2003 – 18 years ago. And a film by Shane Meadows for Eurostar (Somers Town) in 2008 – just 24 months after This is England.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a da Vinci-esque adman, Saville, who turned 60 this year, started his career as an account man, before rising to be joint creative director at GGT. In 1996, David Brook, then marketing director of Channel 5, offered him the chance to work on its launch with Dutch agency KesselsKramer, led by former GGT creatives Erik Kessels and Johan Kramer. Channel 5 was a conflict for GGT’s major client, Blockbuster, so Saville had to start afresh. By the time Waites joined in January 1997, bringing with him an international reputation after five years in the US, Mother had been born.
Someone described the agency’s name to a Campaign journalist in September that year as reflecting, among other things, “the fact that it can be relied on, it creates things and it tends to tell you stuff you don’t want to hear”.
Today the agency insists it has always been about creating “work that makes our mothers proud”. As a reminder, behind Mother’s long reception desk sit photographs of the staff’s mums.
“Mother was radical, not just for an agency, but for any kind of workplace at the time,” Cabral, now a director through MJZ, says. “Even the name was radical but it made a lot of sense to me. I was young; a young sponge from another country. Learned to live on my own. Not to leave my bike parked at the gate of an Underground station…”
Most start-ups proclaim they’ve gestated a transformative new model. But Mother did. Even not having founders’ names above the door was relatively uncommon in the late 1990s. Then there was the lack of formal departments, with everyone sitting around a single table. Rather than hiding in a cubicle with a pad, creatives worked with people of different disciplines to come up with, and then craft, the best idea.
“It’s easy to forget how radical Mother was when it first opened its doors,” Al Moseley, global chairman and chief creative officer at 180, says. “There were no glass-walled offices to hide in. Everyone sat around one table in one room. Clients had meetings sitting on thrift store sofas and conference calls happened in a caravan parked in the corner of the room. In the post-WeWork world we live in now, this sort of environment is commonplace but at the time it was unheard of.”
Mother still works largely in the same way. After admiring the agency from afar, Danny Brooke-Taylor moved there after exiting Dare in 2012 and before launching Lucky Generals. The thing that struck him was how everyone, regardless of their role, cared about the quality of the output. He says: “No-one is waiting for the thing to pop onto your desk for you to do your bit. You and your little group find a corner on an old 1970s sofa and ask: ‘If that’s what we’re going to do how are we going to do it?’ You forget roles very quickly.”
Brooke-Taylor has a metaphor to describe what working at Mother is like: “It felt like this outdoor swimming pool. There’s glorious sunshine and everyone’s splashing and laughing, having a real scream,” Brooke-Taylor explains. “So, you think, ‘Oh this looks fun’, and you jump in. You’re having a laugh and bounce around and splash and then you suddenly realise, fuck, this is hard work.
“There’s no shallow end. There’s nothing to hold on to. So, all the joy and colour and noise and fun and spirit that is above the surface is only possible because of the relentless churning of legs and energy under the surface.”
Mother took this suitably globe-trotting picture when it promoted Susan Hosking and Peter Robertson to executive creative directors, international, in 2019. They work on international clients across Mother’s offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. Pictured alongside Saville (left) and global chief executive Michael Wall (front).
“It’s always about getting the work better”
Many creatives find this singular focus on giving everything you can to produce brilliant work exhilarating. Yan Elliott, now joint executive creative director at The & Partnership, speaks wistfully about his time at Mother between 1998 and 2006.
“My role was to work bloody hard to do the best work of my life,” Elliott says. “There was so much trust given to you. People would listen properly. When you feel like you’re being listened to, and you’re encouraged to write what you think you should write – what you want to write – there’s no stopping you.”
Pay, back in the UK after working at Headspace’s headquarters in Santa Monica for three years, agrees. “Creatives are super-empowered and allowed to own their thinking. The best idea wins and then everyone piles onto the best script,” she says.
“You never have a conversation where it’s like, ‘Oh no, maybe, maybe that’s pushing it too far,’” Sobhani, who was at Mother between 2013 and 2016, says. “It’s like, ‘Is that what we believe is the right thing to do?’ And if it is, you go at it. You really fight for it. There’s a bloody doggedness but it’s always about getting the work better.”
Many of the former employees quoted in this piece were at Mother at the same time in the early noughties. Pay says their “proximity” to Saville and Waites – who were still running the agency day to day – “rubbed off” on many of them.
“The truth of Mother, and probably what a lot of people don’t say, is that so much of the work is Waitesy grabbing your computer off you and typing out the script for you,” Outhwaite-Noel confides. “That’s why so many people have got amazing jobs as a result. So much great stuff on their reels is Mark Waites.”
"I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think any other agency would have hired me"
Saville would also offer hands-on support, including with pitches. “He’d come into the office to see how we were getting on and change it 24 hours before,” Elliott says. “Change the whole thing – the strategy, the design. We’d have to do an all-nighter. Then, we would do an amazing pitch, and we’d go and celebrate. And we’d all go, ‘Was it better?’ ‘Yeah, it was better.’ That was the annoying thing. It was always better.”
At this time Saville and Waites were also intimately involved in finding and nurturing talent. Jex and his then partner, Rob Potts, wrote a Super Noodles ad while on placement at Mother in 1998 but chose to take a job at BMP DDB instead. Reflecting on the decision, Jex says they wanted to learn from the likes of John Webster, Jeremy Craigen and Dave Dye before “learning to break the rules”. But when they got jobs at Mother six years later, they were welcomed as returnees despite them only having done a three-week placement there.
In 2001, a few weeks after Darren Bailes and his then partner Al MacCuish left BMP DDB, amid the fallout that followed it losing the Vodafone account, Waites gave them a call. Putting on a Northern accent, Bailes recalls: “He said, ‘Do you want to come in for a pitch, or what?’ It’s against DDB… I thought you might like that.”
Despite the agency being based all the way in east London (as even St John Street, EC1 felt at the time), they said yes. The pitch was ITV Sport, and Mother won. ITV Sport was short-lived but Bailes stayed at the agency for seven years working on PG Tips and Schweppes, among other brands.
One of Bailes and MacCuish’s most notable pieces of work was for Pimm’s. The ads featured Alexander Armstrong popping up at comically inappropriate moments before declaring, “It’s Pimm’s o’clock” as he opened a hamper of ingredients to mix up the spirit.
For an ad that Saville and Waites weren’t sure about – Bailes says he was “heartbroken” when then Mother creative director Jim Thornton told him they didn’t like the first spot – it ended up being “huge and ran for years”. Even today, customers announce it’s, “Pimm’s o’clock” at the bar Bailes’ daughter works at in Hull, East Yorkshire. She proudly tells them her dad wrote that line each time – much to her colleagues’ bemusement. Mother is brilliant at creating work that permeates culture in this way.
“I think it was only about five years later when Mark would go: ‘Yeah, fair enough. It was all right that, really,’” Bailes says. “He’s the nicest man in the world, Mark, but when you don’t really know him, you think: ‘Fuck, he hates me.’
“It was that kind of treat them mean, keep them keen [attitude] that kept us all just trying so hard to do the best thing.”
Pay, who worked alongside Gehrig during her first stint at Mother between 1998 and 2005, still remembers their first and only bad creative review – for Organix haircare – 20 years later. “We said: ‘That is the last one we are ever going to get,’” she says. “We were two very ambitious young creatives on a mission.” They worked all night, demanded another review and sold the new idea.
“Mother has always been a training ground for great talent,” Kolbusz, chief creative officer at Droga5 London and an emerging director, says. “My five years there were thrilling, frequently brutal and exhausting, but I don’t regret it. Everything I learned at St John, and later Redchurch Street – the way they prioritise developing all their talent with a multi-faceted skill set – armed me for a successful career. It’s a worthwhile experience for any young creative.”
Mother’s offices in Shoreditch replete with inflatable breast to tackle the stigma of women breastfeeding in public.
Opportunities are there for the taking
Creative reviews are open affairs. Everyone pitches their ideas in front of the whole department – so the pressure for them to be great can be immense. “To keep up, you had to have good ideas,” Moseley, who worked at Mother between 2002 and 2004, says. “So, you had to have a high work-rate to produce them.”
Outhwaite-Noel and Middleton recount a formative creative review experience. The brand was I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and the talent in the room included Bailes, MacCuish and Kolbusz, as well as Cabral (who went on to create and direct the creative Cadbury “Gorilla” at Fallon before moving to directing full-time).
The year is 2003 and the young team is convinced it has cracked it and will secure a job. The idea is a series of people eating a piece of toast with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter on it in front of fantastical scenes – a zombie apocalypse, for example. The people are so amazed that what they’re eating is not butter they don’t see what’s right in front of them.
Then-Mother partner Stef Calcraft, now chief executive of creative transformation at MediaCom, is the one to respond. “What you’ve done there, lads, is advertising 1.0,” he says. “The product is more amazing than this amazing thing that’s going on over there.”
In comparison, Kolbusz’ idea features a man who has the memory of a goldfish so he has to be reminded of everything – including that I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter isn’t butter. Cabral’s route – “I can’t believe it’s not Planet Earth” – involves two versions of Earth that are ever so slightly different. One has butter, the other has I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. On one Earth Michael Jackson is Michael Jackson, on the other he is a bollard.
Reflecting on the experience over Zoom, Outhwaite-Noel and Middleton laugh at their naivety.
Their ideas improved quickly. First up was a TV ad for Observer Sport Monthly. Then came Abba to Zappa for the launch of Observer Music Monthly. A full-time job followed and the duo moved from Middleton’s parents’ house in Guildford to a London house-share. Today they’re joint chief creative officers at the independent shop Creature London, the agency they left Mother to set up in 2011.
The duo attribute their choice to set up Creature, rather than take a job they were offered at Bartle Bogle Hegarty London, to the entrepreneurialism they absorbed at Mother. Saville and Matt Clark, the Mother partner and finance chief, have made several successful investments, including in digital agency Poke, which was sold to Publicis Groupe. Many ex-Mother creatives decide they want their own playset too.
"When you’re encouraged to write what you think you should write, there’s no stopping you"
Ben Mooge launched Work Club in 2008; Elliott and Luke Williamson opened Fabula, after a stint at WCRS; MacCuish opened the entertainment company Sunshine in 2012; and, more recently, the creative behind Moneysupermarket’s “Epic strut”, Kyle Harman-Turner, opened Other, part of the Mother family.
Mooge started at Mother as a runner (its ninth employee) in 1997 when it was based in a small flat overlooking Soho Square – he and his then partner sat in the kitchen with the finance and legal team.
He went on to work on campaigns including Al and Monkey, Pot Noodle and QTV. Now chief creative officer at Publicis Groupe, Mooge says the agency’s entrepreneurialism inspired him to start his own business.
“That’s why I did Work Club,” Mooge says of the digital creative agency he and his co-founders sold to Havas in 2014. “I had no other option. I’d been there for 10 years and they taught you too well. You’re like: ‘Right, I’ll look for somebody [to do a start-up with].’”
Ana and Hermeti Balarin, currently executive creative directors and partners at Mother London but preparing to cross the Atlantic again to take the same role at Wieden & Kennedy Portland, converted their placement after cracking a Boots brief. Initially, Ana had worked as a physiotherapist when the pair moved to London from Brazil but agreed to team up with Hermeti and give advertising another crack. Two weeks into Mother, the Balarins found themselves in front of a serious-looking group of Boots marketers presenting their idea. Creatives often present their own work today but Mother pioneered the practice.
“It changed our whole outlook,” Hermeti says. “Because it made me go: ‘OK, I’m in those meetings now, so I can’t just sit there and blame it on someone else when they don’t sell it. I can’t live on this little cocoon of, I don’t care about the business side of things, I just do my thing.’ It was an incredible experience.”
“It creates much more rounded creatives,” Ana adds. “That can think strategically. That can think business-wise as well. You can’t just be the lonely genius in a room coming out with wacky scripts.”
Powering passion projects
That’s not to say there isn’t a place for wacky scripts, though. From the start, Mother was committed to making great ideas happen, client or no client. One of its first was Airfix-style models of football hooligans sent to the media ahead of the France ’98 tournament. The tabloids were horrified about the disrespect showed to poor England fans.
If that was discourteous, next came No Cluedo, a version of the whodunnit board game that asked who killed Princess Diana, featuring members of the Royal Family and Diana’s one-time butler Paul Burrell as characters and a rolled-up copy of The Sun in place of the lead piping. Four Feet from a Rat, a comic, was distributed quarterly with Time Out. Strips included the then new London mayor, Boris Johnson, as an Indiana Jones-style character battling villains such as Dr [Ken] Livingstone.
At Mother, creatives’ extracurricular projects are “equally as important” as the account they are hired to work on, Sobhani says. “There’s not a siloed sense of, like, ‘Oh no, they do that.’ It’s like Disneyland for creatives,” she continues. “You go and play.”
Cabral remembers finding a VHS library in the basement of Mother and watching English-language films he’d never heard of – Being There, A Room for Romeo Brass and The Godfather trilogy – for the first time. “An analogic binge,” Cabral says, from his base in Argentina. “One night I dreamt in English. It was surreal. There was an infinite world out there and I was curious. I had a small camera and started making videos. I edited at home all sorts of short films – think pre-YouTube videos that didn’t make much sense but delighted me. This had nothing to do with the agency work, but somehow nurtured it.
“One day, like a ripe apple, I dropped at Fallon and eventually I became a director. Shot plenty of commercials all around the world – even made a film about dreams. And one day, I shot an ad for Mother. It was about a girl waking up in the sky, falling down into her bed. It ended with a line that said: ‘There’s no place like home.’ I think it was a thank-you note.”
Mother’s passion projects reinforced the agency’s brand, as did beautiful boxes containing the agency’s creds that were sent out to new-business prospects. Saville takes it all very seriously. While many leaders enjoy being the mouthpiece and ambassador, today Saville directs from behind the camera, focusing the lens on the work and the brand. When Campaign did a feature on the first decade of Mother, Saville almost refused to be photographed (agreeing in the end to appear alongside the other four partners at the time, made up like old men). Roll on 15 years and he preferred to let others speak for this piece.
But we do know that back in late 2019 Saville decided to switch the agency’s focus from “Making our mothers proud” to “making our children proud”. He asked the agency’s international executive, creative directors Susan Hosking and Peter Robertson, to develop what that might mean
in practice.
The killer whales of the Mother menagerie, Hosking and Robertson, haven’t strayed since setting their sights on the shop when they moved from New Zealand in 2002. Their work has included Boots’ 2009 “Here come the girls”, inspired by the bizarre British pre-Christmas party ritual seen through their Kiwi eyes, and Bloody Good Period’s “#NoShameHere”.
“Making our children proud” is to become a focus for the whole company, Robertson, who was encouraged to speak to Campaign, says. “In terms of future generations, not just our own children,” he laughs. “[We’re looking at] how Mother is going to use our creative power to help make the world a better place. To do more good in the world. And encourage the next generation into creativity that maybe wouldn’t have considered it.”
Ana and Hermeti Balarin (seated with the goose) have promoted the importance of kindness since taking over as ECDs. They run the London agency alongside fellow partners Katie Mackay-Sinclair and Chris Gallery – though not for much longer.
Some other things have changed at Mother over the past 25 years. The Balarins were the agency’s first ECDs when they were promoted in 2015 (though Stephen Butler was a partner at the agency between 2010 and 2013). And they work slightly differently from their forebears. Hermeti says they no longer leave making decisions about ideas to the last minute.
“There is a media ecosystem now and they cannot do their jobs if we don’t do our jobs,” he explains. “It took the sting out of some of the situations. Pitches used to be quite dramatic. We made a mission to try and make them super-enjoyable because we don’t have the account yet.”
In a partial switch from the competitive environment of the noughties – which, like the best advertising, didn’t work for everyone – Ana says looking “analytically” at people’s happiness has been a focus. The married couple work under the assumption that if people aren’t happy, the ideas aren’t going to be good. They have short shrift for the belief that creatives should be prepared to kill themselves for an idea. Not least because times have changed and rising talent won’t buy it.
To remain a daring and innovative business for 25 years is a brilliant feat. To make captivating work for 25 years is impressive. To do it while remaining independent and profitable is virtually unheard of.
A heady mix of nutrients enabled Mother to give birth to so many of advertising’s creative leaders. For the good of the industry, let’s hope the agency remains as fecund as ever.
Agency conventions born of Mother
When Mother emerged kicking and screaming into UK adland in 1996 it left a trail of bloody conventions in its wake. One of the agency’s biggest legacies is that many of its innovations or quirks are now standard practice across the industry (although Mother remains unique in sending an apple pie as a celebratory gift to clients and friends):
Agency names
Mother wasn’t the first agency to launch without its founders’ names above the door but it was rare. A 1997 Campaign article looked at the “swelling throng of new-wave boutiques” with “silly names” such as Mother, Quiet Storm (still going) and PHD’s planning offshoot Rocket (now Hearts & Science).
The industry caught on fast, however. The celebrated creative director and co-founder of Love or Fear Dave Dye wrote in Campaign about how in 2008 – just 10 years after Mother launched – naming an agency after its founders (Dye Holloway Murray) was tantamount to putting up a “closed for business sign”.
Hiring from abroad
London’s adland is full of people from all over the world in 2021 but this wasn’t always the case and Mother pioneered hiring international talent.
The look of agency offices
If the debate about the post-pandemic future of offices is put to one side for a minute, advertising agencies’ offices are generally pretty fun. They are open plan and full of random things with quirky, not always totally appropriate meeting rooms.
In the 1990s many agencies were a sea of chrome and glass. In comparison, the Mother office in St John Street had an old caravan in the reception and a giant picture from the Brazil 1970 World Cup on the back wall (Mother versions of recommendations made by an architect and feng shui expert respectively, according to Publicis Groupe’s Ben Mooge).
Again, Mother wasn’t on its own – 180 chairman Al Moseley, remembers HHCL had a meeting room decked out like a padded cell – but it did it loudest and most consistently.
The location of agency offices
It might seem preposterous now but when Mother moved to St John Street in 1998 it was a big deal. Darren Bailes, executive creative director at VCCP, remembers asking, “Where the fuck is the east of London?” Forget newer arrivals like Karmarama, Lucky Generals and Uncommon Creative Studio, most agencies were still based in Soho. In 2004, Mother moved even further east to the Biscuit Building in Redchurch Street. Shoreditch has been transformed in the 17 years since, no doubt in part to the presence of creative businesses like Mother.
Creatives presenting work to clients
Everyone has seen Don Draper present to clients in Mad Men but in 1990s Britain, agency account people were actually the ones responsible for selling work into clients. Mother might have had to bring in mothers (its version of suits) in the end but creatives – whatever their ranking – always presented their own ideas.
Hermeti and Ana Balarin say being required to attend client meetings and present your own work from the beginning of your career is the key reason why so many Mother creatives go on to become leaders.
Making more than just ads
Mother has always supported its staff’s various creative endeavours and sought to make more than just advertising. This included – but is not limited to – its Christmas card. The brief to make the card is always a competitive one and has resulted in a Jesus impersonator taking the Tube and the only respondent to an email receiving $10,000 in cash.
