Why Creative Circle Chose Mother's Robert Saville To Receive Its President's Award

When Creative Circle's out-going president Gabriela Scardaccione announced the recipient of the 2024 President's Award in Margate, she acknowledged that - for the first time in the award's 79-year history - the chairs of the juries had been asked to choose between two candidates.

Usually, the president alone picks the recipient of the prestigious award, but this time round a collaborative effort was required. This was because Scardaccione herself worked for many years alongside the person she wanted to nominate, and she'd already chosen another former colleague - Libby Brockhoff - as the winner of the President's Award last year.

In the end though, her preferred candidate was also the unanimous choice of her jury chairs and duly Mother founder Robert Saville was named the recipient of the 2024 Creative Circle President's Award.

As he couldn't be there in person, Scardaccione read out a letter she'd written to him, explaining why he has been such an important figure in the industry and to her personally.

She said: "[Robert] You taught me that the environment is the work, and that misunderstandings and mistakes are very important to create fresh and imperfect outputs, because that’s what Mother output is: imperfectly human."

Scardaccione went on: "There is no shortcut to joy and happiness. To get there we need to be ready to walk through pain too. By giving you this award, I want to make sure that people know what it feels to be human at the workplace, to allow ourselves to constantly make mistakes and say the wrong things; to be allowed to have outbursts at the office; to be able to cry without feeling shame; to go to HR meetings with the founder at Cicada (that’s a bar) and get wasted; to walk away from the agency for weeks and come back only when you picked up the phone; to go into coaching sessions and throw cushions at each other until everyone cried so much that there wasn’t anything left to do but laugh."

Scardaccione's choice was applauded by an array of former Mother employees. Hermeti Balarin, the joint CCO of Weiden & Kennedy London, said of Saville: "He'll always find a way to motivate you, to look at things differently, to challenge yourself to try and do more than you think you can."

Ben Mooge, the CCO of Publicis Groupe, added "Robert possesses the most lethal mind in UK advertising history."

DDB's global CCO Chaka Sobhani said that Saville "has the most incredible quality as a human being and as a leader to see things in you that that you didn't know were inside."

And the director Juan Cabral praised Saville's vision in creating a culture that embraced people from all over the world. "He was so great in allowing us in to take that different perspective on the UK itself. And Mother then became a global force and there was that weird balance between the humanity of being there on that island but then having that very British conquering spirit, that was really, really inspiring."