Mother Founders Scoop D&AD President's Award

The agency's work, culture and even its name was revolutionary from the start

By Creative Salon

26 May 2023

The founders of Mother won the prestigious Presidents Award at last night's D&AD ceremony as D&AD President Rick Brim honoured the agency's impact on the creative industries.

Pictured left-to-right above are Mother's founders Stef Calcraft, Matt Clark, Mark Waites, Andy Medd and Libby Brockhoff. Not pictured is Robert Saville, Mother's lodestone.

Who receives the President's Award is an entirely personal decision for the President, and is given to a person - or unusually in this case an entity - that has had both a significant influence on the industry and on the president themselves.

Explaining his decision to choose the Mother founders, Brim said: “I chose them because I'm a massive believer in the power of a creative “gang” and no-one embodies that more than Mother. Their philosophy is based on the creative collective and itspossibilities, and as an outsider looking in, that was intoxicating.

It wasn’t just myself who was drawn to that, as over the years, some of the industry’s most talented individuals have sat around that table.

With that unfair share of talent comes the work, brilliant, funny, populist bat shit crazy work my mates in Manchester knew and work that showed the rest of the industry a new way.

It’s not just their output that showed their dedication to creativity, it is how they behaved, the companies they started, the investments they made and the films they commissioned. With the criteria being someone that changed things for the better, I feel confident in my choice of that someone being Mother.”