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Lorraine Tao and Elspeth Lynn are two of the founding partners of Zig, a Toronto-based advertising agency whose client list includes the likes of Molson, Ikea, Best Buy, Virgin Mobile and Unilever. The firm was behind last summer's ubiquitous Molson ads in which Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones is tied up and expelled from the country by angry Canucks when he expresses doubts about Canadians' devotion to beer.
Zig's ads have a fun, pop-feminist sensibility. In the early days, the partners' calling card was a piece of pro bono work: a television ad in which a horny teenager named Cam offers to examine women's breasts for them—if they're too lazy or ill-informed to do the cancer-screening exam themselves. "Put your breasts in my hands," he exhorts. ("We had to make sure he was cute, a little innocent, because otherwise it would have seemed creepy," Lynn says.)
In June, Zig won a gold medal at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for its Blair Witch Project-style footage on the Internet promoting Scream TV, a cable channel specializing in horror programming.
And before the three partners left for home, their peers from around the globe had named the once-little Canadian shop the world's third-best media agency.
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