Mother Advertising

-

Mother Advertising is an advertising agency with offices in London, New York and Buenos Aires. Mother London is the UK’s largest independent advertising agency^{[citation needed]}. The agency's philosophy is "To make great work, have fun and make money. Always in that order."

Mother's London office

History

Founded around a kitchen table in 1996, 15 years later Mother now has over 400 employees in three continents after Mother New York was founded in 2003, and Madre, based in Buenos Aires launched in 2005. The agency is renowned for breakthrough advertising campaigns ; from the early Levi’s Odyssey spoof for Lilt, its celebrity fronted "Goldspot" cinema adverts for Orange, "Here Come The Girls" for Boots to the famous PG Tips campaign featuring Al and Monkey. The agency has a reputation for its campaigns beyond traditional advertising having produced a feature length film for Eurostar Somers Town.

Mother has pioneered a creative culture where all employees work directly with clients, including the creative teams. It is the agency of record for many world famous brands including: Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Stella Artois, Boots, Schweppes, IKEA, COI (Government anti drugs) , PG Tips , Pot Noodle, Amnesty International and Cumberland amongst many others.

Offices

Mother moved to its current offices in Shoreditch in 2006, designed by Clive Wilkinson architects. One of the major features of the office is a huge 250-foot (76 m) concrete desks which can seat all the Mother staff.

Mother NY recently moved from a loft space on Bond St in the Noho district, to a 36,000-square-foot (3,300 m²) space in Hell’s Kitchen. The building was designed by Steven Sclaroff.

Awards

Mother London was named Agency of the Decade in 2009 by Campaign^[1], and have previously won Campaign’s Agency of the Year in 2008, 2002 and 2001. It has won the British Television’s Advertising Awards’ Agency of the Year three times ^[2], Marketing magazine’s Agency of the Year and in 2005 the Marketing Services Financial Intelligence declared that Mother was the top best-run, privately owned marketing services agency in the UK, based on financial credentials ^[3].

Mother New York was named Advertising Agency of the Year in 2009 by Creativity Magazine ^[4] and Madre were called “one of the most outstanding Latin American agencies of the year” by AdLatina.

Notable campaigns

Mother London have created numerous high profile advertising campaigns.

Al and Monkey

In 2001 Mother created Al and Monkey to promote ITV Digital, a campaign that was named Campaign of the Year by Campaign Magazine in the same year ^[5] After the closure of the channel, Mother brought the characters back as the face of PG Tips.

Pablo the Drug Mule Dog

Mother worked with the COI's drugs awareness brief resulting in Mother re-branding the National Drugs Helpline as FRANK. The FRANK camapaign also included the creation of Pablo the Drug Mule Dog voiced by David Mitchell of ‘Mitchell and Webb’. The campaign won the Best of Show award at the IPA Best of Health Awards 2009 ^[6]

Pimms' O'Clock

Mother invented the "Pimm’s O’Clock" slogan^{[citation needed]} and created the series of adverts featuring Harry Fitzgibbon Simms, ambassador for Pimms. Harry’s character is played by Alexander Armstrong from the popular comedy duo Armstrong and Miller.

Orange Gold Spots

Mother London worked on the Orange Gold spot campaign from 2003–2009. The campaign became the most awarded cinema campaign in British advertising history.^{[citation needed]} Amongst many notable films stars the campign features Snoop Dog, Patrick Swayze, Verne Troyer, Rob Lowe, Rob Schneider and Angelica Houston.

Coca Cola 'I Wish'

One of Mother’s most famous campaigns is ‘I Wish’ for Coca Cola featuring Sharlene Hector singing ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free’. The advert became popular around the world, and this was the first non-US Coke commercial to be screened within the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Mother projects

Mother has developed creative ideas that spread beyond traditional advertising. In 2008, Mother made the feature film Somers Town with Shane Meadows for Eurostar, which won Best British Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Best Actor at Tribeca and was the biggest grossing independent British film of 2008. For Time Out^[7], Mother created four graphic novels called "Four Feet From a Rat" in collaboration with the graphic novel publishers Mam Tor Publishing. At the 2008 Edinburgh Festival, Mother created a musical for Pot Noodle ^[8], the same year, a single with Universal Music and The Sugababes for Boots, and for Pimm’s, London’s first outdoor comedy festival.

For each World Cup since 1996, Mother has done something to commemorate the tournament. In 1996 they created airfix models of football hooligans, English sushi in 2002, and Ronaldo the diving winker toy in 2006 when England were knocked out of the quarter finals by Portugal. In 2010 Mother journeyed to East London in South Africa to play a football tournament against local teams^[9].

Mother has also created other one-off projects including a series of uncarriable carrier bags, a losers sticker book to commemorate the English football team failing to qualify for the Euro 2008 championships and an honest spam Christmas email - in which one of the recipients could win £10,000. The winner ended up donating the money to charity and the video telling the story won a silver lion at Cannes in 2010^[10]

Partners

The founding partners of Mother are Robert Saville, Mark Waites, Stef Calcraft, Andy Medd and Matt Clark. In 2010, Dylan Williams and Stephen Butler were both made partners of Mother London.

The founding partners of Mother New York are Andrew Deitchman, Linus Karlsson (no longer at Mother) , Paul Malmstrom and Rob DeFlorio (no longer at Mother). In 2010, Michael Ian Kaye, Pernilla Ammann and Tom Webster were made partners of Mother New York.

References

1. ^ 10 December 2009, 03:55am (2009-12-10). "Advertising in the noughties - Advertising agency of the decade - Mother London - advertising news - Campaign". Campaignlive.co.uk. http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/973187/Advertising-noughties---Advertising-agency-decade---Mother-London/. Retrieved 2010-08-09. 
2. ^ http://www.britisharrows.com/award/mother/
3. ^ Bold, Ben (2005-09-06). "Mother proves it is more than just a creative hotshop to top financial league - Brand Republic News". Brandrepublic.com. http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/504507/Mother-proves-just-creative-hotshop-top-financial-league/. Retrieved 2010-08-09. 
4. ^ "Agency of the Year 2009 - Features". Creativity Online. 2010-08-02. http://creativity-online.com/section/agency-of-the-year-2009/723. Retrieved 2010-08-09. 
5. ^ Campaign, 11 January 2002, 12:00PM (2002-01-11). "TOP PERFORMERS OF 2001: Mother is Agency of the Year on the back of fantastic creative work and an enviable new-business record but Bartle Bogle Hegarty ran it a very close second - Brand Republic News". Brandrepublic.com. http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/50204/TOP-PERFORMERS-2001-Mother-Agency-Year-back-offantastic-creative-work-enviable-new-business-record-BartleBogle-Hegarty-ran-close-second/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH. Retrieved 2010-08-09. 
6. ^ Awards for Mother Advertising and Langland. Pharmafocus. August 16, 2009. http://www.pharmafocus.com/cda/focusH/1,2109,22-0-0-0-focus_feature_detail-0-493002,00.html 
7. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/30/boris-johnson-time-out-comic
8. ^ Mark Sweney (2008-07-21). "Pot Noodle: The Musical set for Edinburgh Fringe Festival | Culture | guardian.co.uk". London: Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/21/advertising. Retrieved 2010-08-09. 
9. ^ http://www.shots.net/article_detail.asp?atype=1&id=10262
10. ^ http://www.ipa.co.uk/Content/IPA-agencies-roar-with-pride-at-Cannes