Creative Partners: Mark Lewis and Matt Fitch

During their long partnership, creative team Mark Lewis and Matt Fitch have not only developed lauded spots for The Guardian, Axe and KFC, they’ve even grown a ‘third brain’. The adam&eveDDB  duo tell Danny Edwards about forgetting which of them came up with an idea and shunning the labels that define their roles

The relationship between adam&eveDDB creative team, Mark Lewis and Matt Fitch, pre-dates their advertising partnership as the two have been friends since 1999 when they were at school together in East Finchley, London, and while this article’s interest lies in their current creative connection they admit that the edges of their partnership are hard to define. “Most peoples’ stories begin at 25 or so, when their careers start,” states Fitch, “but ours is more like a story of our life and this is just what we’re both doing now. Ten years ago we were doing something else, 20 years ago we were at school… you know?”

Initially, the pair took different paths after leaving school. Lewis headed to Japan to teach English, while Fitch, after a stint working at Framestore, went to America. The pair kept in touch and after a couple of years, in 2007, both returned to the UK and became flatmates in London.

After being inspired by Saatchi & Saatchi at a careers fair, and spending a year in the post room at Grey, Lewis signed up to the prestigious advertising course at Watford, while Fitch began working at the Human Rights Division of the Ministry of Justice. “When I’d get home [from Watford],” explains Lewis, “I’d tell Matt about my day and ask for advice because he has an art background [Fitch attended London’s Central St Martin’s after leaving school, before doing a degree in animation at Southampton Solent University] and it sort of snowballed from there.”

“I always wanted to get into film,” Fitch says, “but I just ended up temping to pay the bills, and being a bit miserable with it all. Mark had started at Watford but I was going through my hippy phase and was, like, ‘that’s the devil’s work, you corporate whore!’ But then I started to see the reality of it and how creative and interesting it could be, and that it could utilise my talents, so,  organically, we just started working together.”

And that work has seen the pair lauded for campaigns that have been both commercially and critically successful, including work for Axe (Surgeon and Soulmates), The Guardian (Paella and MegaGlove), KFC (Families) and, most famously, the epic, gold Lion-winning Three Little Pigs film, also for The Guardian newspaper.

The pair’s working relationship is, they think, different to many other creative teams’ approach because of the history they share, which means they have very similar frames of references for many things, plus that existing relationship means they don’t worry about offending each other. “Having the same experiences, and sometimes the same memories, can be very beneficial,” says Fitch, “but then our lives are also quite different now; I’m a dad and Mark’s not, for example, so we can bring different things too.” “And we don’t have to skirt around the issue if either of us thinks an idea isn’t good enough,” adds Lewis. “We have arguments all the time but then we’ve had arguments before that aren’t related to the job. We don’t need to tread lightly on each other’s emotions.”

Spidergrams and dead canaries

Lewis and Fitch ‘officially’ became a team in early 2009 with their first placement being at MCBD. There were further placements at agencies, including VCCP, but their break and “first proper job” came when they went to BBH London. Their placement there, from early 2010, led to a full-time job by the end of that year and the work mentioned above all came about during their five-year stint at BBH. They moved to adam&eveDDB in August 2015.

When they started out, people suggested they should define their roles, because that’s just what employers expected, and though, nominally, Fitch is the art director and Lewis the copywriter, they say that they don’t like to label themselves. “I agree that it’s good to have one person who, when the shit hits the fan, says ‘that’s my thing and I will deal with that’”, explains Fitch, “but Mark and I don’t really work that way. We’re both the art director and copywriter, who does what just depends on the day and the project.” “And if you’re doing this job every day,” adds Lewis, “wouldn’t you want to dabble in everything? I know you can’t be a jack-of-all-trades but who says you can’t have an artistic opinion if you’re a copywriter? I don’t like the term ‘creative’ to be honest. I don’t know what you’d call us; idea generators, problem solvers… whatever, but that’s the bit I like; Matt and I sitting in a room trying to come up with the solution to a problem.”

And is that what they do; sit in a room and talk it out? “We do just like to go to a quiet space in the office, or we’ll work from one of our homes, and then within that time we’ll have an hour or so by ourselves before we come back together and see what each of us has got,” says Fitch. “But once we’ve had that first hour or so apart, it is a joint process, with the two of us building and improving on the other’s idea to the point where you can’t remember who came up with it originally.” “The most important thing is that undisturbed time,” continues Lewis. “Not from each other, but from everybody else.”

One of the processes Lewis and Fitch subscribe to is the good, old fashioned spidergram. “When we’re knocking our heads against a brick wall,” says Lewis, “we just get a blank piece of paper, write a key word in the middle of the page and just create a spidergram. Spidergrams are the best. It’s just a map of your brain and you can see what you’ve said. And a good brief can help you so much too; a line, or a little nugget. All we then have to do is interpret it in a different way and that’s it!” “There’s no magic formula though,” says Fitch. “If there was, I’d be teaching it.”

The key to a good working, creative relationship is both people pulling their weight, the pair thinks. At different points one or other of the pair might take on more weight, but they’re always pulling in the same direction. “You need to be a united front,” states Fitch. “You need to go in together, protect your idea and fight for it. In any room there are two of us versus one of whoever, be that a creative director, a director… Mark and I are always on each other’s side.”

Their close working relationship seems to have many career positives, but are there any drawbacks to working so closely together? “The only negative I can think of – though we’ve not experienced it yet – is that you’re so tied to each other that you need each other in ways other jobs don’t,” states Fitch. “For example, if I want to go and live in another country and Mark doesn’t, that’s a discussion to be had. If I want to quit because I hate my boss, that impacts on Mark so I can’t just storm out.” “But that’s also a positive,” inserts Lewis. “It means that you can talk about your career prospects and development with someone who really understands.”

But their advertising career prospects are not the only thing they work on together as the pair form part of the six-strong Dead Canary Comics team, a group of ad industry artists, writers and comic enthusiasts who create and publish their own books. Is there such a thing as spending too much time together? “Well,” laughs Fitch, “it allows us to get away from our day job and think about something different. It allows our ‘third brain’ [the combination of Fitch and Lewis’s minds] to relax a bit. There are six of us in DCC but Mark and I are the only two to have that added relationship and we’ve found that working on DCC and advertising actually help each other.”

Being friends, the pair says, has some great advantages and they believe they’re very lucky to be able to do what they do; “we’ve definitely got a better job than our friends,” grins Fitch. “Not many people get paid to hang out with their mate and talk bollocks all day.” “But also,” adds Lewis, “I would say that just because we’re friends, that doesn’t make us a good team in and of itself.

We’re both opinionated, we fight for ideas when we think they’re right and we back each other up. We work well together, we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, ultimately, we both want to make the best work we can, both for the brands we work on at adam&eveDDB and for, essentially our own brand, Lewis and Fitch.”