When people are laughing, says Mother, London creative director Mark Waites, odds are you've had a good year. But when they're crying, he suggests, that's when you know it's been a great one.

Marked by the growth of its two-year-old New York office, which produced the first work for new brand 10 Cane Rum, and the unveiling of a Buenos Aires offshoot called Madre, 2005 yielded all sorts of encouraging returns for Mother, London. But nowhere did the agency assert itself more resoundingly than on its reel; bolstered by standout new work for mobile phone company Orange, not to mention typically smart creative for UK druggist giant Boots, Miller, MasterCard, Fanta and The Guardian/Observer, Mother's calendar year ranked among the finest of its nine-year tenure.

Leading the pack was the Dougal Wilson-directed "Dance" for Orange, which, combined with the Noam Murro-directed "Blackout", gave the brand a humane dimension that had previously evaded mobile phone carriers. "In all these years at Mother, I have never had such a reaction to one spot," Waites says. "I've had people emailing me saying 'It nearly made me cry, my wife cried, the dog cried...'"

Waites credits the reaction largely to the work of former BBH CD Stephen Butler, whom Mother hired to oversee the Orange account earlier this year. "He's had a fantastic influence on the people around him," he says. "Stephen's shown them that there doesn't just have to be humor all the time, and a lot of people have grown from working with him."

That maturity hasn't gone unnoticed. Although always known for strong creative, Mother has typically been regarded as primarily a comedy shop. Now, with Orange as its calling card, the agency has begun to demonstrate a new set of capabilities. "They've grown out of their first slightly one-dimensional phase into a really interesting and unpredictable phase where they're learning to execute really well," says Blink managing director James Studholme. "They're now visceral humanists as well as funny."

Waites relishes the inherent challenge involved in aiming for more tenderhearted creative. "It's an extreme reaction, to induce a laugh," he acknowledges. "The opposite is to try and make someone cry, and that's even harder to do - much harder, which is why 99% of commercials try for humor."

For all the delirious acclaim Orange has garnered, Waites tantalizingly earmarks an as-yet unaired Coke spot as his runaway highlight of the year. "It's by a Japanese director named Nagi Noda," he says. "We wanted to use a White Stripes track, but Jack White saw it and said 'No, I'm gonna write you a whole new track', which he did. That [spot] has yet to materialize, and there's nothing scheduled right now, but it is one of the best I've ever been associated with."

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