Mother's Co-ECDs on Marrying Love and Creativity

Ana and Hermeti Balarin, co-ECDs of Mother London, have been working partners for a decade, but life partners for 25 years. Hermeti pursued an advertising career with laser-like focus, while Ana took a more circuitous route via engineering, physiotherapy and the NHS.

Their intimacy cuts corners in communication and having your partner along for the ride makes shoots less lonely but, asks Danny Edwards, how do you work and play together 24/7 without bloodshed?

Never mix business with pleasure is an old adage we’ve all heard and, for the most part, completely ignored. I mean, the Cannes Lions, and indeed pretty much all business-focussed festivals, positively encourage the blending of those two things to the point where you’re not sure where one ends and the other begins (useful side note, in Cannes, if you find yourself standing at the Gutter Bar, then the business side of that equation packed its expense account, booked an Uber and bolted for the hills a good while previously). 

But if we can effectively mix business and pleasure, what about business and relationships? Even the most solid of marriages might strain at the thought of commuting to work together, spending the whole day side-by-side and then commuting back home, wouldn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t you end up… “Killing each other?” interjects Ana Balarin, as I try – and ultimately fail – to pose the question diplomatically. Yes, I mumble, something like that.

When they met, it wasn’t murder

Ana Balarin is co-ECD of Mother London and the perfect person to reveal whether working in close proximity to a spouse might really be murder. Another expert witness would be her husband, Hermeti, the other co-ECD of Mother London. The duo have been at the creative helm of the agency since mid-2015 and have worked there as creative partners since taking a placement in 2007. In life partner terms, they’ve been a team since high-school, getting together nearly 25 years ago. “We’re childhood sweethearts,” says Hermeti. “Is that what you call it? That’s us.”

Since taking on the co-ECD mantle the pair have overseen some of the agency’s most well-received work, notably for Stella Artois, IKEA and MoneySupermarket.com, the campaign for which includes the now infamous Epic Strut, Epic Builder, Epic Wolf and Epic Skeletor. All of which proves that their creative partnership is thriving. But how difficult is it maintaining a successful relationship in the real world as well as in the advertising one and does one negatively impact on the other?

Not particularly, would be the succinct answer, as far as the Balarins are concerned. The pair seem entirely at ease both in their roles and in the way their relationship works. “To have a partner in the same industry as you can be a positive thing,” says Ana. “Because advertising can be a hard industry for the partner who isn’t in it.

There can be late hours and a lot of travel. Although it’s slightly different now that we have someone waiting at home for us [the Balarins have a young son], previously, if we were here on a Tuesday night at 11.30pm, it was ok because at least we were together. And going on shoots, which could have been seen as a nuisance, means you have someone going with you. You’re working together, seeing the world together, and having all these amazing experiences – work or otherwise – at the same time.”

Ana and Hermeti’s professional partnership only started when they were employed by Mother 10 years ago. Prior to that their career paths, or at least Ana’s path, meandered slightly. Hermeti always had a laser-sighted focus on the advertising world being, he says, “very, very certain that I wanted to be in advertising”.

In Brazil, where the couple are from, advertising is still a big part of mainstream culture and it was a part that Hermeti was attracted to. He studied communications and advertising at university and got a job in the Brazilian industry after graduating, and steadily progressed from there. Ana was less certain of what her future might hold and flirted with engineering before finally taking an advertising and marketing degree at a different university. However, it wasn’t what she’d hoped for.

“Two years later I was looking at all the people I studied with and thought, I don’t like these people at all. I couldn’t see myself working with them, growing old with them. So I left the course midway through and got into something completely different.” That something was physiotherapy. Ana studied for five years and then specialised, working as a physio for the NHS when she first moved to the UK. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Hermeti says that he had a “mildly successful” career working for other agencies in Brazil, but wanted to try out his talent in London. He split with the partner he was working with in Brazil and headed to the UK. It was, he explains, a sort of scouting mission, to see if he could make it, and to see if he and Ana could make a life there. The pair got engaged and Hermeti headed to London.

A year and a wedding later Ana joined him. It’s not long after this point that Ana realised she had lost her love of physiotherapy, which also coincided with her husband deciding that his creative partnership wasn’t working out. “I always knew Ana was a really good writer,” says Hermeti, “a really good creative. So I threw my book away and that’s when I say I proposed to Ana for the second time.”

But the proposal of working together as a creative team was not met with such unequivocal acceptance as the one of marriage. Ana had already considered and discounted advertising as a career option and was sceptical about rejoining the fray. But Hermeti convinced her to at least give it a go. “I said to her, ‘We’re both struggling to find a path, but why don’t you help me on this while you look for another career.’” Luckily for them both, Ana agreed.

They entered a monthly competition run by the Financial Times, called The World’s Toughest Briefs. The first time they won. The following month they were runners up. Ana tried to tell herself it was just luck. Hermeti told her it was no such thing and, after building a formidable book and featuring in the annual talent competition, Cream, the pair won a placement at Mother and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

The beautiful benefits of being Brazilian

In terms of their working versus their non-working relationship, and whether they ever gave any thought to how one might impact the other, Ana says that “It was always with the agreement that we would try working together as long as it didn’t jeopardise [our non-working relationship]. The personal relationship would always come first.”

“[Our partnership] makes so much sense,” continues Hermeti, “because we are so easy with each other. We have been together this long, I suppose, because we understand each other very well, even with the unsaid stuff.”

“There’s a lot more freedom,” adds Ana. “We become quicker because there’s no going round and round, stepping on eggshells. We more quickly say ‘No, I don’t like this, let’s move on,’ which is actually what causes most of our arguments to this day.” Ana laughs, “Mainly, not exclusively, but mainly we argue about work. Other disputes fall to the background, which is good for the relationship, I guess.”

So how does the partnership work in practice? Does one have certain skills that complement the other? Do they divide and conquer or combine to overcome? A bit of both, seems to be the answer. “The computer skills, I have,” starts Hermeti, “so in the purest sense I’m more the art director, or designer. Then with writing it’s the opposite and Ana has more skill in crafting longer pieces. But overall, we both do the same [things]. We’re 50/50 on everything and equal on all the tasks, conversations and ideas generation.”

How about working from home? Does being married make that a more straightforward and possibly more practical approach? “We work mainly from the agency,” says Hermeti. “It’s loud, there’s music playing, people around, but we somehow manage to sit at our desks, put our feet up and just bash out some ideas, then do the presentations.”

“I always doubt the people who talk about a specific creative process,” adds Ana. “Maybe it’s not just us but we’re not that regimented. I don’t have all my ideas in the shower, or all at 5am or whatever. I think everything blends in: places you’ve been, stuff you’ve seen on the internet, shows you watch, music you hear… we don’t really do anything intentional to generate ideas.”

Their ability to “bash out ideas”, and brilliant ones at that, is what got them noticed at Mother in the first place. When asked what pieces of work they’re most proud of, they both agree that one of them is definitely the first thing they worked on as a team at Mother. They had only just started at the agency and the big brief going around was a summer project for a beauty regime.

“We thought it was too good to be true,” says Hermeti. “As two Brazilians that’s [an environment] we’ve known our entire lives, so we had an unfair advantage.” They took five ideas to the meeting (mistakenly presenting to the head of strategy, who they thought was the creative director) and untimely what came out of it was a spot for Boots called Moment of Truth, in which a woman is stared at by hundreds of people on a beach as she prepares to lay down to sunbathe.

Staying together for the sake of the creative

Now that they’ve moved up to ECD level, they say they do miss having their own projects and accounts but realise that they need to “be more beneficial to the agency, so that means us being together all the time is not always the best use of our time”. Though they may not work on individual briefs together in the same way as they used to, theirs is still very much a partnership, but can they envisage a time when one or both might want to branch out, do something different or go it alone? “I think we definitely could,” says Hermeti, “because all these years here have given us so much confidence and belief in our own individual abilities. I wouldn’t actively look for that because I think part of the joy of figuring this thing out means we share this whole story now, and it’s really weird and wonderful, stressful but a great feeling at the same time. And I think that will continue to be the case.”

“You sometimes sit next to a creative team,” says Ana, laughing, “and you overhear them talking and it’s exactly like a marriage. Whether they’re two guys, two girls, whatever, they sound like a married couple. And anyway,” she concludes, considering the question of whether the creative duo might ever split, “it’s probably easier to get out of a real relationship than a creative one.”