Bringing up mother

Mother’s account wins keep rolling in. Last week, the Clerkenwell-based agency won the &£8.5m advertising account for the Observer newspaper (MW last week). Last month, it snatched the &£16m Egg Internet bank business away from HHCL & Partners.

This year it has nearly doubled its billings to &£80m, winning the Schweppes and Oasis soft drinks accounts and the Batchelors Cup-a-Soup business, now owned by Campbell’s. Another of this year’s crop, the ITV Digital double act of comedian Johnny Vegas and his woollen monkey – the cute branding device that may not save the television network but could make its collapse that much more entertaining – has been ubiquitous. Lilt, Dr Pepper, alcopop Source, Kiss FM – wherever you look, some piece of off-the-wall creative advertising from Mother leaps out at you.

Since it was set up five years ago by former GGT creative director Robert Saville and ex-Persil brand manager Stef Calcraft – who has also worked at Leo Burnett and BBH as board account director – Mother has injected a “so bad, it’s good” style into its ads that is a refreshing change to the overblown pomposity of much advertising.

Its kitsch, often downbeat and sometimes surreal images seem original – although they were presaged in some of the creativity of the early Nineties, pioneered by the likes of HHCL with its Tango campaigns. However, the ability to tell an engaging story about a brand using quirky English humour is a refreshing angle in a rather formulaic business.

Breast-feed your brand, it’s all the rage

If Mother is this year’s flavour, many wonder how it will avoid going stale. And just how did it concoct that flavour in the first place? One agency network executive says: “Mother has a genuinely different offering, not just the same old stuff in a different package. Clients are involved in the inner workings of the creative process, there are fewer account handlers, it’s pretty much total immersion. Mother also recruits people from abroad. No one else is doing that, but it helps it to produce advertising of a certain style.” Two-fifths of Mother’s staff are from overseas, from countries as far afield as Argentina, Sweden, Croatia, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand.

But the executive says that although the Mother approach is usually a strength, it is also a potential weakness: “It inspires passionate commitment from clients. But if you have a multiple-stakeholder client, it might not work quite so well.”

What this means is that, when a client gives its marketing department a free hand in agency dealings, Mother works. But when managing directors, finance directors and others are involved, they may find the Mother approach more difficult.

Any limitations on the potential for Mother to keep growing are down to the attitude of the founders, says the agency executive. He claims that all successful start-ups eventually face the question of “over-trading” – making promises that they can’t keep because they have too much on their plate. “Mother hasn’t got there yet, but if it continues on its present course it will have to face it,” he says.

Mother’s Stef Calcraft insists the agency will stay independent and is not planning any deals with major agency networks. He says the essence of Mother is “fantastic ideas that travel”.

Along with another start-up, Soul, which was set up by former staff from BBH – itself once the enfant terrible of the agency world – Mother claims that changes in the way brand owners are structured and the greater responsibilities given to marketers mean the old ways of doing things have gone for good.

Calcraft says Mother has dispensed with account managers – who act as mediators between clients and creative and planning departments – and has clients working directly in teams with creative workers and planners, who are above all marketers. This makes the process far more efficient, as it cuts out the middle man or woman and Calcraft claims that Mother’s productivity is two or three times greater than traditional agencies.

“In the past decade, client organisations have restructured and delayered – there are fewer people with more responsibility at a younger age. But agencies haven’t responded – the traditional agency structure is 40 years old,” says Calcraft.

Soul partner Duncan Bird adds: “What is so incredible is that 13,000 people in UK advertising spend their time telling clients to think differently. They are still structured as they were in the Fifties.”

Letting the children go out to play

Former Mother insider Michael DaCosta, who handled PR for the company and has now set up his own branding agency called Hotsuma, says he cannot envisage Mother selling out or getting into bed with a network. But he adds: “It is very good at creating a myth about itself that people want to buy into. It hasn’t overtly ‘PRed’ itself in a naff way – it hasn’t allowed in the TV cameras like St Luke’s has – but it has attracted like-minded creatives and clients and allowed creatives to play around with ideas outside work. Mother is not the best-paying agency in the world, but it is a bit of a cult.”

He believes Mother needs to spend more time nurturing creative talent through relationships with design and art schools (though with a limitless pool of overseas creatives, this may not be necessary), and should pay more attention to other forms of communication, as well as advertising. DaCosta praises Mother’s contacts in Europe with like-minded agencies, such as Kessel Kramer in Amsterdam and Experimenta in Portugal, however. These could help with pan-European briefs such as that of Egg, which is planning a European expansion after its relaunch this spring.

Calcraft says DaCosta is “180 degrees wrong” on both staff pay and diversification. Mother takes very good care of its staff and pays them well, he says. It looks for ideas that can be used across all communications, not just TV. All ideas are subject to the T-shirt test – if they can’t be put on to a T-shirt, they are scrapped.

Lone parent or Mother’s union?

There are many who see the future for successful independents such as Mother – and other start-ups such as Soul and Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy – in replicating the moves of their predecessors in previous waves of new agencies, though the agencies play down such possibilities. The wave of creative start-ups in the Seventies and early Eighties thought they could control their expansion through stock-market flotations, bringing in investment but leaving agency directors in control. But they found the pressure of responding to investors’ demands overbearing and diluting of their creative output, so they ended up either selling out to a bigger group – as in the case of WCRS – or eventually being ousted like the Saatchi brothers.

The next wave of fashionable creative agencies of the late Eighties and early Nineties avoided the discredited stock-market route and went directly for the sell-out, as in the case of Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, which was snapped up by Y&R; and HHCL, which sold a stake to Sir Tim Bell’s Chime Communications.

According to Bob Willott, editor of Marketing Services Financial Intelligence, the flotation model for start-up agencies will remain discredited for a few years to come, given the experiences of the Eighties and the present state of the markets. And he wonders whether the sell-out route is still viable. “Omnicom has bought everything it wants,” he says. The past few years of rapid consolidation do suggest that the big networks have more than enough creative shops.

‘I was like you when I was younger’

Veteran creative Andrew Cracknell – now executive creative director of Bates UK – compares the rise of Mother to that of Doyle Dane Bernbach in the US in the Sixties. DDB revolutionised ads by incorporating Jewish New York humour into them.

Cracknell says that Bill Bernbach was the first to “have the balls” to tell brand owners that “the public do not worship your product, so you have to talk to them in an interesting way”. He believes Mother has reanimated this idea.

As chairman of Ammirati Puris Lintas, Cracknell lost a pitch for Unilever’s Supernoodles account to Mother. At the time, Unilever executives wanted to promote Supernoodles as a main meal, but Mother staff apparently held up the packet and said: “Food values – this? You must be mad. Look at the E-numbers.” Cracknell says: “APL did not have the nerve to do that. Mother does not seem to be frightened, it goes for it with gusto, and that’s why it does outrageous stuff.” Indeed, Mother is so called, one story goes, because “Mother can be relied on, but occasionally tells you stuff you don’t want to hear”.

Cracknell believes Mother has a good ten years left as an independent, before the competing demands of clients will make the going tough. “You don’t have to become boring, but it is unbelievably difficult not to,” he says.

He points to the fates of some start-ups from his generation – BMP was founded in 1969 and only now is having to cope with the succession issues as creative John Webster and chairman Chris Powell take a lower profile. Abbott Mead Vickers only recently experienced a hiccup as David Abbott and Peter Mead reduced their involvement. Lowe Howard-Spink, Leagas Delaney and BBH have all fared well for many years – though they have been forced into deals with networks to continue servicing their biggest clients.

But there is nothing so ephemeral as creativity. HHCL, widely considered the top agency of the last decade, has quickly fallen from fashion – just this year losing Egg, the AA and even facing a review of Tango.

One of Robert Saville’s plans is to push the Mother brand in alternative directions, such as retail or magazines, making it a sort of Virginesque mother brand. To do so would require, as Richard Branson knows only too well, considerable financial backing.

If Mother – and other start-ups – really have discovered a new way of working, in keeping with the changing faces of client companies, they will eventually have to face up to the demands of being very large agencies. Do they want to sell out to a global network in exchange for a yacht in the South of France and weekends at New York’s Chelsea hotel? The Mother mythology would suggest they ought to settle for something more in keeping with the ads they produce – a rainy Bank Holiday in a caravan in Skegness, perhaps.