2025 Inductee

Elspeth Lynn & Lorraine Tao

Creative Leaders

Long before Canadian advertising embraced the nuance, emotion, and complexity needed to truly speak to women, Elspeth Lynn and Lorraine Tao were quietly rewriting the rules from within. Over a decades-long creative partnership, they didn’t just deliver marketing—they transformed how the industry approached gender, storytelling,
and human insight.

Lynn, who studied art history at McMaster University, was inspired to pursue advertising after seeing a lone female creative, Marlene Hore, featured in Marketing Magazine. “She inspired me,” says Lynn. “It was the first time I thought, ‘If she can do it, maybe I can too.’”

Tao, on the other hand, was headed for a career in design until a writing course at OCAD with ad veteran Allan Kazmer sparked a new path. “He taught me that creativity is really about human nature—why people do what they do,” she recalls. “I realized I didn’t want to just make things look beautiful. I wanted to understand what moved people.”

When Lynn and Tao first teamed up in the mid-’90s at Leo Burnett, it was unusual—not because they were mismatched, but because they were both women. “Back then, there were rarely more than one or two women in the creative department,” says Tao. “And the rule seemed to be: don’t put them together.” But creative director Jeff Finkler took a chance—and it paid off.

Their shared fascination with human motivation became the bedrock of their creative process. Though their personalities differed—Lynn being more extroverted and Tao more introspective—they complemented each other naturally. “We were never that team that fought over ideas,” Lynn says. “We’d talk, and we’d just get there. Together.” Their early work introduced a voice that was fresh, sharp, and emotionally resonant.

For Special K, what began as a routine voice-over revision evolved into a transformative message. Departing from traditional weight-loss narratives aimed at male approval, they reframed the story with a more empowering perspective: do it for yourself. “We weren’t going to sleep well making ads that told women to stay slim to please their husbands,” Tao says. “We had to change the narrative.” Similarly, in Fruit of the Loom’s “Stuck” campaign, they shifted the focus from sex appeal to comfort.

At Ammirati Puris Lintas, they continued to break ground. The Vaseline “How Beautiful Feels” campaign rejected glossy perfection in favor of raw emotion, redefining beauty as an internal experience rather than an external ideal.

This drive to uncover and elevate genuine human truths led them, in 1999, to co-found Zig with Andy Macaulay. “We didn’t want to feed the machine,” Tao says. “We wanted to feed the idea.” Zig’s philosophy—Ideas in their most powerful form—reflected that ambition.

They rejected cookie-cutter formulas and default media choices. “The solution might be a book, a haunted house, a single radio ad,” Lynn explains. That freedom led to genre-defying campaigns like Vim’s “Prison Visitor,” which metaphorically captured the suffocating cycle of housework—an idea grounded in research and brought to
life with meaning.

It wasn’t just that they had good ideas—they understood their audience deeply. “Being women gave us an advantage,” Tao reflects. “We knew how it felt to be spoken down to by ads.”

That understanding resonated through all their work. Campaigns for IKEA, Unilever, and others were infused with insight and often humor. In “Cam’s Breast Exam,” a cheeky PSA for the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, the original idea—adult men volunteering for breast exams—felt off. Tao proposed a simple but critical pivot: cast a teenage boy. “That detail made the difference between a flop and something unforgettable,” she says.

“Zig went from a nothing agency to, ‘Holy shit, these guys are really good,’ in a very short time,” says Ted Rosnick of Vapor, who collaborated with them on audio production. “It wasn’t about awards—it was about proving that what Lynn and Tao were doing was different, and it worked.”

Zig grew to 135 employees, with offices in Toronto and Chicago and a client list that included Virgin Mobile, Lavalife, Molson Coors, W Network, Holt Renfrew, Pfizer, and Best Buy. Named strategy’s Agency of the Year in 2002, it earned accolades from Cannes, One Show, D&AD, and the Clios.

But their legacy isn’t only in their campaigns—it’s in the culture they built. Zig was a place where people could show up as their full selves. They hired with heart, bringing in emerging talents like Rethink’s Aaron Starkman—later named one of Adweek’s 100 most creative people in the world—when he was just a promising copywriter.

“We weren’t about ego,” Lynn says. “We were about doing the work and doing it well.” Tao adds, “When everyone—from account managers to project coordinators—knows what success looks like, they can all move toward it together.”

Despite their trailblazing work for women, they never sought the feminist label. “We weren’t waving placards or calling ourselves feminists,” says Lynn. “But we had a mission: to do better work for women. To do better work, period.”

Now living on opposite sides of the Atlantic—Lynn as co-founder and ECD of the U.K. agency Unbound, and Tao freelancing from Vancouver Island—the two remain proud of what they built.

“I had to ask myself: did I make a difference?” Tao reflects. “And I think, yes. We helped shift how advertising speaks to women. We helped move culture.”