Mark Greenwood and Mandy Bell

After Newcastle, Mark Greenwood and Mandy Bell went straight to London and unbeknownst to each other, found flats in Ealing. They somehow bumped into each other in late ’80 and ended up spending quite a lot of time together.

Mark was working at D’Arcy MacManus & Masius, having won a student graduate competition, mostly thanks to the genius of Dave White, the prizes were jobs as junior art directors. Roger Sealey and Simon Glendenning (78-81) joined Masius via the same route the next year.

Mandy had a job in the design and marketing department of international plastics manufacturer Wavin. When Wavin moved out of town Mandy went freelance, doing identities, brochures, leaflets, with a particular speciality in AIDS and Drug Information literature.

In ’84 Mark worked with Nick Reed on a campaign for Pernod, won some awards which gave him a ticket out of Masius and into Holmes Knight Ritchie. Debbie Tiso was a visitor to HKR, the designer of the agency brochure.

Mandy and Mark married in ’86, Mark moved onto Yellowhammer, the quintessential ‘80s agency just as its bubble burst and he spent a depressing two years watching the agency slide into bankruptcy.

The joy of the arrival of their first child Sarah in ’90 was tempered by the simultaneous arrival of a big mortgage, Mandy closing up her freelance business and Mark being made redundant. Mark’s dreams of masterminding multi-million pound media campaigns were replaced by the harsh reality of finding freelance work in a recession, one unforgettable job was a brochure for a sewage pump distributor.

Sam was born in ’93, Mark found permanent work at Connell May and Stevenson, and it was around this time that Mark was blown away by a visit to 8VO, the studio of Mark Holt.

As the digital revolution kicked in, Mark helped CMS win the Yahoo account in ’97 by creating a bespoke ‘Web Site’ on the ‘World Wide Web’. He moved onto CPM as a Creative Director where he created some of Unilever’s earliest steps into digital advertising and then helped establish the digital dept. at Clark McKay Walpole. All this experience could have made Mark an early digital marketing guru, however Mark ignored the obvious opportunity, and had a happy decade at CMW working in all sorts of media on Lotus, John Lewis, Porsche, Butlins etc etc. Awards continued to drift in, including three nominations at Cannes for the Lotus ‘Faceless People’ campaign.

Faced with an empty nest in 2013, Mandy and Mark sold their Ealing semi, moved to a converted barn in Norfolk and set up Greenwood & Bell, a two-person micro agency, working mostly for B2B clients in East Anglia and London, and creating ads with brilliant local copywriter Pete Evans (78-81). Alongside G&B work, Mandy has taken the chance to develop her personal illustration style creating abstracted landscapes on the iPad.

G&B have recently celebrated ten years of not going bust.