Creative Profile: Elspeth Lynn

The middle of the road and the comfort zone are two areas that Elspeth Lynn avoids. Shunning the safety of her own successful co-founded shop, zig, she left Toronto for London to help Profero bag numerous plaudits and, since 2012, has been group ECD of M&C Saatchi London. She tells Tim Cumming about the spaces she does like to occupy, including the front end of a horse

When your idea of a relaxing break from the responsibility of being group ECD of M&C Saatchi [since this interview was conducted Lynn has left M&C Saatchi] is to renovate and sell on properties in central London (four over six years) or, failing that, wilderness walking on the Isle of Skye, it’s safe to say that concepts of space play a big part in your life. Trailing success and acclaim in both traditional and digital platforms, Elspeth Lynn has a particularly refined, multi-dimensional sense of space – that’s public, living and imaginative space, rather than outer space per se, though Dr Who does indeed come in to the story.

Since joining M&C Saatchi from digital agency Profero in 2012, she’s overseen innovative space-fillers such as the House of Peroni experience at 64 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, led major cross-platform campaigns for Transport for London, NatWest, and Virgin Holidays, and refashioned M&C Saatchi right down to its interior décor and creative identity. “I absolutely love reimagining spaces,” she enthuses breezily over a midweek breakfast (egg white omelette with slices of avocado) at the elegant Ham Yard Hotel a few minutes from her office in Golden Square. “I’m interested in the whole notion of space,” she says. “I loved doing House of Peroni over the past couple of years, because it’s about the branding of a space as opposed to an ad. Dimensionalising the ingredients in a space is a really fascinating thing.”

She speaks with a soft but distinct Canadian accent but actually she’s an Essex girl, born in Greenford, who emigrated to Canada with her Scottish parents when she was seven. She can remember the moment that move was decided upon. “I was watching Dr Who by myself in the living room when [the TV and] the power

went off. My father opened the door, saw there was no power and said ‘Bloody hell, we’re moving to Canada.’” And so they went, leaving English weather, glam rock, Dr Who and power cuts behind and settling in Toronto. “It is a very nice place, very nice people, but the trouble is,” she smiles, “it’s middle of the road in every sense. It’s safe, but safe in a way that isn’t very interesting.”

The ‘rare’ quality of being female

To make it more interesting, she studied art and art history at university in Hamilton, near Toronto, but struggled to find work after she graduated, and found herself, briefly, working in “a very small print shop pasting up business cards for a guy who had absolutely no design sense at all”. She laughs uproariously at the memory. “It was summer 1986, and the people around me were – well, it was just a job to them – and I thought, ‘This is not my life, I need to discover what my life is about,’ and that’s why I applied to art college.”

There, she studied for a BA in advertising and came to the course with the no-time-to-lose motivation of a mature student, and that motivation paid off. “I worked crazy hours,” she says, “did everything I could because I couldn’t stop thinking about the memory of that printing shop.” More laughter. Graduating in 1990 – pre-internet, with just one computer in the whole college – hers was a solid training in the basic principles of ideas and creativity. What drew her to advertising was the application of art as much as its creation. “The relief was that I loved having a task,” she says. “I loved having boundaries to work with. And I had teachers who really cared about what they did. And they were all in the industry.”

One of them, DDB creative director Allan Kazmer, hired her for her first art directing job. Two years later, she’s at MacLaren McCann, art directing campaigns for Coffee-mate. A year later, she’s masterminding work for IKEA at Roche Macaulay, and in 1995 she becomes art director and vice president at Leo Burnett, handling the innovative Fruit of the Loom and Special K campaigns, and meeting her future creative partner, copywriter Lorraine Tao. “I had had male creative partners until then, and had never really felt… understood,” she says. “Lorraine and I were opposite in personality – she was very calm and steady and nothing fazed her, whereas I was super-excited and passionate. We had the most wonderful friendship – I think that in advertising, no matter what happens, you have got to have that one person you can look at and go, ‘I can’t believe we got through that…’” The two of them made a reputation for themselves in the face of some rigidly old-fashioned attitudes when it came to sexual politics at work. “When I began, no one was interested in a young female art director, in terms of what they had to say. I remember a very senior account person at DDB telling me, ‘You just need to be quiet at this meeting’… And I was bursting because I knew the conversation was heading off in the wrong direction. It was so frustrating.”

When she joined McCann, she was the first woman to be hired into the creative department in 14 years. Now that’s what you call sexism in the workplace. How have things changed? “Of course,” she smiles, “there are now a lot more than there used to be, but there’s still only a few per cent of female creatives in the whole industry. The difference is that clients are much more interested in a female perspective and a female influence. So it feels really good to be rare, and not just be the typical trainer-wearing, T-shirt-wearing male creative director. There’s a lot of them out there, and a lot of great ones – I admire them tremendously – but I love still being unique; it gives me a different perspective on things, in terms of the way I work and the kinds of things I like to do and how I make clients feel.”

Banish the ego, get on with the work

A turning point in Lynn’s career was setting up zig in 1999 with Tao and business partner Andy Macaulay, who she’d met during her brief stint working at the agency he co-founded, Roche Macaulay. Tao and Lynn were both at Ammirati. “We decided if those idiots can run an agency, we can, too,” she laughs, and over an agreeable sashimi lunch, Macaulay, who’d grown frustrated with the direction his own agency was taking, invited them to do just that. “We rented a space and a photocopier, the office we chose had a pile of rubbish in it, and that was it. Everything fell into place. It was definitely one of the most exciting times – we didn’t know what was going to happen; it was just the three of us and a photocopier and my dining room table, and no clients to speak of. We were creating something out of nothing. It took two years to get it up and running.”

zig grew rapidly from zero to 135 employees with offices in Toronto and Chicago, bringing in the business of clients including Unilever, Virgin Mobile, Molson Coors, IKEA, and Pfizer, and won Marketing magazine’s agency of the year in 2002, just three years after pushing open the door onto that rented, rubbish-strewn first office space. Talk about renovation. zig remained in the top five agency ranking from then on until they sold the business to Chuck Porter to become Crispin Porter + Bogusky Canada in 2010. The awards came in from Cannes, The One Show, D&AD, The Clios, and others, with gold Lions for Vim/Unilever’s 2004 spot Prison Visitor, 2008’s IKEA Low Voice, and 2006’s Get Scared More Often campaign for Scream TV.

Above all, Lynn says, zig taught her about the importance of collaboration, and taking care of business by getting away from the strictures of a job title and the ego that goes with it, in order to get the real work done. “You need to do what you need to do and care about your work,” she says. “I’ve always cared, and I think clients can always tell if you don’t.” Now, at M&C Saatchi, she says, they just want people to love working on their business. “It really isn’t that complicated. And it doesn’t cost any money for an agency to do. It’s free. It’s about finding people who genuinely care.”

MINI endeavours, maxi success

A kernel of restlessness threaded with the pull of family ties set her next move in motion after selling zig. “I had a lovely secure life in Toronto with people I loved,” she says. “I couldn’t be more comfortable, and that was perhaps part of the problem.” So, in 2009, she moved to London, the last of her family to return to the UK. “I felt it would be interesting to strip all of it away and just be me, land on my feet and see what happens,” she remembers. “For me, it was essential for life. I’ve had no regrets doing it.”

In 2009, inspired by Lars Bastholm’s adage that “if your skill is digital, learn storytelling; if your skill is storytelling, learn digital”, Lynn joined Profero as ECD. “They were digitally conceived with no sense of brand or idea, while I was more brand advertising with a very thin knowledge of digital. So, I thought it was the right thing to immerse myself in it.” Overseeing M&S’s brand advance into the realms of digital, creating the advertising for global fashion business ASOS, and masterminding a new World Record attempt to cram as many people as possible into a MINI Countryman – another Cannes Lion winner in 2011 – Lynn’s experience at Profero underlined the importance to her of a strong core idea that could power a whole fleet of multi-channel communications. “Too many agencies are still too focussed on scripts,” she says. “But what’s the thought underpinning it, so it can be a digital thing, a physical thing, and a social thing? How do you get people engaged and involved? One thing I came up with that I think worked, was a tagline that went, ‘ideas that people can belong to’. If you don’t have them, it’s hard to get that social stickiness that you need.” And as Lynn points out, the stickiest social media memes of the past year – the ice bucket challenge and no-makeup selfies – came from individuals, not from agencies.

Getting out of the back end

The call to replace Graham Fink at M&C Saatchi came in 2012, via headhunter Grace Blue. Frustrated by her feeling of being “stuck at the back end of the horse” at Profero – being given stuff to work with that “had no dimension to it, no story behind it, so that I didn’t know what to do with it digitally or socially”, she answered the call. “I had two things going for me: I was a female creative, and there are few of us; and I had digital and traditional, which I found extraordinarily helpful. I loved the fact that it didn’t have to be about print ads anymore, but that you could start figuring out what I call brand ingredients and how they operate no matter what the channel.”

So, whether it’s fashioning the House of Peroni, managing her own recreational renovations, expanding the space for other women creatives in advertising, or creating new kinds of spaces for brands in social media and digital, the creative spaces in which Lynn works seem permanently up for scrutiny. “Mostly everyone now is part of an integrated team,” she says of M&C Saatchi, though she emphasises the importance of traditional forms, great copywriters and great art directors even on new speedy platforms. “No matter what space you’re in, things still need to be beautifully written, and beautifully realised,” she says, “so those traditional skills are incredibly important, but you also need your digital experts, and people who really understand that space.”

The place where the idea lives and multiplies is paramount though. She returns to the theme of the idea that connects all the spaces. “Most of the work now comes from clients who expect you to take an idea and make sure it can go anywhere,” she affirms. “We were doing a pitch a few months ago, and the client said, ‘You guys seem to be the masters of integration,’ and I’m so happy that’s happened with M&C.” That big smile again. “I’m hugely happy I’ve made it more integrated.”