Dramatization. Professional writer in closed course:

Client: Hi, is there any chance you can get thousands and thousands of consumers to call us non-stop pleading us to telemarket them in the morning so they can buy stuff from our store?

Mother New York: Sure no problem, how about we make a crazy spot with Darth Vader and Heidi Klum?

Client: Awesome! Here’s the money, see you next week!

Whilst this may sound like a creative wet dream, it’s not so exaggerated. The guys at Mother don’t believe much in rules, in fact they don’t think much about them, they simply follow their guts and experience and do things. As a result, great work and opportunities have been knocking on their doors since they started.

Mother London has always been known for their amazing work. However, for the model to work in New York they knew it wasn’t going to be just about setting up their massive continuous table like they famously do, it was about putting the right people around it. They started with 4 guys Paul Malmstrm and Linus Karlsson, who had a reputation for being the ultimate creative team in the world after creating memorable work for Virgin Mobile, Miller Lite, and the ever famous MTV Jukka brothers, and Rob Deflorio, who was the global advertising director for a company called Nike Inc., and Andrew Deitchman, who was Global Director of Marketing Communications and Business Development at Red Cell. Now that the Mother desk and the client list has expanded we’ve decided to take a sneak peak inside Mother’s mind.

Everyone, allow me to introduce to you Mother.

ihaveanidea: So you guys are going to hit your 2-year anniversary soon! What are you going to do?

Andrew: Well, we get breakfast brought in every Monday morning. I think we may get some special muffins for the 2-year anniversary. Nah, we don’t have any plans but everything is going well. We’ve been in this office pretty much since we opened.

It literally was the four of us and a folding table and now there are clients, chairs, tables, couches and one really lame T.V.

ihaveanidea: Has it been fun? Stressful? Tell me all your problems, tell me about your childhood. How did it all begin?

Linus: I’m too old for this shit.

Andrew: We’ve been having a lot of fun. Most of us come from working with big clients and big organizations and it’s refreshing to be in a small place and be masters of our own destiny, and it’s also nice to know that when things don’t go well there is no one to blame but yourself. And when things go right it’s usually because of the people around you.

Linus: Yes, Andrew usually takes credit for everything.

Andrew: Not true, but when there’s anything wrong, it’s definitely never ever my fault.

But yeah, it’s very refreshing! It’s really nice to have no agenda other than to have fun and to hire people that are nice and talented.

“Always have clean underwear.”

ihaveanidea: Is there ANYTHING you miss from the big agencies? And more importantly is there anything good about them?

Andrew: Where I used to work before they used to bring me and other partners lunch every day. They had a chef who came in to do lunch. Now I order in Chinese.

Rob: There really isn’t anything that I miss. If we were a small company working with small clients I think I would miss the stakes of working with the big clients, but that’s not the case. We’re small, but we’re working with the Coca Colas, Millers and Targets. We weren’t sure that was going to be the case, but the clients stuck with us so it’s been good.

There are some people I miss from various agencies along the way but there really isn’t anything I miss.

ihaveanidea: [to Linus] How about you?

Linus: [COMPLETE SILENCE FOR AN ENTIRE MINUTE]

ihaveanidea: I guess nothing much! [laughing]

Linus: I think what is really great about working in this industry is that you get to work with interesting people that you sometimes become friends with.

I don’t miss any business related issues. It doesn’t have to do with small or big to me. It’s about how you are feeling. I’m sure people out there are feeling good about working for the big agencies. But it’s really about account relationships and we are fortunate because all of our clients are great and we get to have fun.

Rob: There’s a tradeoff in terms of roles. I don’t have any kids but I always assume.

Linus: Are you sure about that Rob?

Rob: I think. I can only assume. I hope!!

Well, people have kids and everybody says it’s the greatest thing that will ever happen, they also tell you that you lose a lot of freedom and have to wake up in the middle of the night.

Not having a kid is what happens when you are in a big agency. You can always hide and deflect some of your responsibilities. But at the same time the sense of ownership and accomplishment isn’t there.

So here the kid might wake up and cry in the middle of the night but the joy that you get from what you are accomplishing is greater than the trouble.

Linus: The fundamentals, and I know I speak on behalf of Paul as well, is that we never see ourselves as being a part of the industry. We don’t spend as much time thinking about the industry to be honest. We like to solve problems and work with our clients to figure things out. The fortunate thing about our job is that we are exposed to many insights from different industries and we get to solve a lot of different problems, which is very cool.

“It’s unfortunate that when I go back and count the hours of what I spent doing most of my career, in service of clients, or politics, or whatever it seemed important at the time but right now, in retrospective it doesn’t feel important at all.”

ihaveanidea: So let’s imagine I’m your publisher and I call you to tell you that you are going to be writing a book called Startup for Dummies and each of you had to write a chapter, what would your chapter be about?

Linus: Get telephones, before you get clients.

Rob: Get rid of telephones.

Linus: We’ve learnt so much in the last 3 years.

“”

“In the first agency Linus and I worked at we decided not to enter any award shows and save all the money to make a big party for our clients and ourselves. On that night we showed and celebrated all our work amongst ourselves. It was nice, but it was also a bit nave. You could fall off the map.”

ihaveanidea: Have you messed up?

Linus: We’ve messed up a lot! And that’s very important to do.

Rob: There’s nothing harder. It’s like encouraging a culture of failure. Expect it and accept it.

Linus: It’s also important to have lots of patience. This place is like an experiment and it is about people. It’s not about processes. We’re not going to tell you we have a completely new process and that this is the future. You won’t see us talking about that stuff. We feel more comfortable talking about people.

We have a big table over there and the idea is to build this table with different people from different walks of life and different parts of the world with different personalities.

“We are not manufacturing accessories for cell phones. We don’t own a bakery. Do you think at some point we will do more and more stuff that doesn’t necessarily involve clients, and use our skills to do stuff for ourselves? Yeah, I think we will.”

ihaveanidea: Sounds very different from say Anomaly, where it is based almost entirely on a new process. Also sounds very different from Wieden + Kennedy, where it’s not about people or process, but about the work.

Linus: I could not care less about process. Yes, it’s ultimately about the work but how do you get to something that solves a problem? I think the most interesting stuff is around people. It’s about personalities and different ways of looking at life.

Rob: I think there would be a chapter about regarding how to maintain excitement about not having a plan. It happens very naturally in the beginning because, well, that’s actually the plan, while you figure stuff out. There’s something really exciting about that which attracts talent. People want to be on the ground floor of things that are yet to come.

The reality is that we kind of have a sense of where we’re going but not really. I like that, it actually keeps me inspired to work hard every day. It’s interesting because we don’t even know.

I think a lot of companies go through an arc when you have people who act as the keepers of the flame which then get to a point where they say, Hmmm I think there was going to be something else around the corner and it never manifested itself, and then they kind of fall off. You want to make sure that doesn’t happen or at least minimize it. Sometimes that has to do with scale; how big and how fast the company grows.

The other part of it is staying pure to being curious and open about what an agency might become and not worrying so much about where it has to be.

Linus: It’s the difference between saying and doing. We haven’t spent two years talking, we’ve been simply doing.

It comes with the nature of this business because advertising and marketing isn’t a science, so that means there is no right or wrong.

“The idea of this table and this room, which is an open space, extends to the clients. They are part of the table. We really believe in this. You sit down; a team, a group, and you work with whatever the challenge is. There are no human firewalls in this place.”

ihaveanidea: The creative person who doesn’t admit to dreaming on a regular basis of their very own startup is a liar. So if I were mad enough to begin a startup in a big city like NY what would you warn me about? What is the one mistake I’ll very likely make?

Rob: Chasing revenue. Initially the kind of businesses that you bring in is an important decision. When organizations start they have a very delicate outer shell. You can’t take that many hits and knocks without really hurting it. You have to be really smart and find the right kinds of clients that fit with the people that you are.

ihaveanidea: So what’s a Mother client?

Linus: We always tell our clients that we don’t measure success in terms of size or billings. We won’t accept that. It’s kind of irrelevant, even if you are a big or small company.

Rob: You look for individuals that are like-minded. A lot of the business that we’ve gotten has been via pitches or people picking up the phone because they are interested in the Mother brand and what it represents.

So it becomes a self-selection process on the client side because they are looking for something that is different from what other agencies offer, they are looking perhaps to work in different ways, or for the output to be more interesting and different.

But there are also people who say just that and when they come here and see how informal we are, we both realize it won’t make sense for either of us.

ihaveanidea: You guys do a lot of non-traditional work. Is that something that your clients come ready and eager to do or do you have to push them and educate them to pursue opportunities in that direction?

Linus: The idea of this table and this room, which is an open space, extends to the clients. They are part of the table. We really believe in this. You sit down; a team, a group, and you work with whatever the challenge is. There are no human firewalls in this place.

Maybe that’s kind of boring to say, but in my experience it’s really just about hard work. The best work is when you are truly interested in the business of the client and you like to solve problems.

ihaveanidea: Bringing the Mother brand from London must have had some kind of adaptation or modification for it to fit in NY right?

Linus: Not really. The cool thing is that the guys in London spent quite a bit of time looking for the 4 of us. Obviously Paul and I knew each other but meeting Andrea and Rob was a new relationship for us. We immediately connected in the way we viewed this business.

So the guys did a very courageous thing, because they knew we had a similar perspective on things, and they said, you guys go to New York, open Mother and do it your way.

Mother is a global brand. It worked.

ihaveanidea: You said you were not interested in the industry, but how far away are you really from everything that is happening?

Linus: I’m not particularly interested in the industry.

Rob: I think we’ve put the blinders on and kept our heads down to focus on the work. It’s not like we don’t like going to award shows and stuff like that, but we just haven’t made it a priority.

We just didn’t want to have to talk about it until we’d made some work. The more you are part of it, the more you become it. People will look at the work we do, and the people we hire, and the space we work in and draw their own conclusions as to whether or not we are an ad agency or not.

ihaveanidea: Are you an ad agency?

Andrew: I don’t think there’s anything horrible about being an ad agency or an idea agency or a creative content agency or smart business partner. We kind of do all that stuff.

ihaveanidea: A lot of people are branching out into shops that are theoretically not supposed or intended to be called ad agencies like branded content agencies for example.

Andrew: That’s because they don’t want to be pigeonholed as a result of the changing ad industry.

ihaveanidea: But when you pick up the trades and read about you guys you tend to be categorized as one of the new non agencies’ like Anomaly, Chokolat, etc.

Andrew: That’s their problem, we didn’t ask them to do that.

Rob: The media environment has changed. Because creativity and strategy is being applied to things that are not print or T.V. commercials doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call it advertising. I think that ultimately the core of our business is focused around working with clients and helping them further their relationships with their consumers and driving their business.

We are not manufacturing accessories for cell phones. We don’t own a bakery. Do you think at some point we will do more and more stuff that doesn’t necessarily involve clients, and use our skills to do stuff for ourselves? Yeah, I think we will. It would be interesting and would make us an interesting company.

At the end of the day, any company whether they are Anomaly or Taxi, that tells you that they are not an ad agency and that their business isn’t centered on helping clients further their business isn’t being truthful. Then it becomes a game of semantics. Well what business are you in? Branded content? Advertising? Marketing services?

There’s a client involved. A consumer involved. You are involvedhmmmm let see

ihaveanidea: The hype that is happening right now on non-traditional media is pretty crazy. Since you guys are the gurus, tell me where this is all going.

Linus: If you are interested in solving problems then that’s what you do. You ask yourself what is the best thing to do for that client. If that answer happens to be let’s make T-shirts’, well then let’s make T-shirts.

That’s the good thing about being independent. You can have that point of view.

Rob: People like to write about that stuff more and more. So yes, we can win awards with ads, but you can also get your name in the press if you do this crazy street-kids campaign’.

I do think it’s working, but there’s also a weird self-fulfilling thing, in which you are almost like advertising to the industry or a set of influencers that are connected to the media market place and those people then disperse that stuff out. So if you do it because you want to talk to yourself or because the client thinks it would be cool to do, you do end up talking to other people, which wasn’t the case 5 years ago.

It’s different than people who might have done a T.V. ad in which they do a cool director’s cut and then try to enter it in awards show. That stuff was pure wank. But it’s hard to deny that doing stuff that is innovative for innovation’s sake is not useful. It might start like an interesting little component of the marketing plan and actually end up being something that gets spread much more broadly and touches consumers.

ihaveanidea: Do you guys respect advertising award shows?

Paul: On one hand it’s important but you also want to stay away from them because they can divert your attention or make you do work for the wrong reasons.

We come from a school where you are very close to your clients and you have to stick by your responsibilities to them. Everything needs to be done for the right reasons, and the right reason to win an award is to help your client’s business.

The good part about awards is that it helps young creatives.

ihaveanidea: They also double your salaries! But no one gets awards for helping your client’s business.

Paul: That point lies very much in the DNA of this place. Structure needs to be simplified so that there is no filter between the person who has an idea and the one that receives that idea. You are not working here to hide in a room and get a brief with your headlines already written for you.

That is why the client is very much involved when we’re solving their problems.

In the first agency Linus and I worked at we decided not to enter any award shows and save all the money to make a big party for our clients and ourselves. On that night we showed and celebrated all our work amongst ourselves. It was nice, but it was also a bit nave. You could fall off the map.

You need to play a bit by the rules, maybe you don’t want to, but you have to.

Rob: I personally don’t like the Tony Awards because they are too showy and the People’s Choice Awards

ihaveanidea: Say you are a planner, an account guy, a copywriter, an art director or whatever and you want to join Mother. What’s the one skill set, apart from good looks obviously, that you need to break in?

Linus: It’s about chemistry. You have to be a good person, somebody who wants to hang around, especially in an environment like this. It’s an open room with a big table and you spend a lot of time together. You must be a good human being.

It only takes one or two bad apples to break the entire vibe.

ihaveanidea: I know you guys are already probably over it, but in my eyes, if I were you and woke up tomorrow, I’d be like Holy shit! I’ve got an agency in New York! Go back 10 years ago and tell me about the life trip it took you to get here. What did you learn?

Rob: Always have clean underwear.

Linus: And wear sunscreen.

I don’t have any interest in looking back. At least not yet. It has never interested me to analyze what we’ve done.

Paul: We are creating our own dream place and we’re taking everything we have learnt so far, both in life and in work and applying it to this. It is fantastic as you said, we have to pinch ourselves when we realize that yes we are here in New York surrounded by fantastic people having a good time.

Rob: I think you personally need to be very willing to unlearn stuff that you’ve learned and to never think that you know everything. For me, I’ve learnt a lot of great stuff in the big agencies and a lot of it applies, and a lot of it doesn’t apply, so being willing to unlearn that is very important. For me, it’s been an experience of realizing how simple this business really is, or should be, or could be. It’s unfortunate that when I go back and count the hours of what I spent doing most of my career, in service of clients, or politics, or whatever it seemed important at the time but right now, in retrospective it doesn’t feel important at all.

Interview by:
Ignacio Oreamuno
ignacio@ihaveanidea.org
President
ihaveanidea