Lisa Merrick-Lawless
Lisa is Co-Founder of Purpose Disruptors and has spent over 20 years working across marketing, advertising and communications. She has held leadership positions both client and agency-side, working with brands including Coca-Cola, Marks & Spencer, Heineken, Tetley, Unilever, WWF, Innocent and Greenpeace across the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2018 she came to understand her own connection to the climate crisis and the role the industry she worked in was playing in driving it. The following year she co-founded Purpose Disruptors to ‘help the advertising industry transition so it only creates work in line with a 1.5 degree world.’
In 2021 the Purpose Disruptors team launched Good Life 2030 at COP26, introducing the first short documentary about the relationship between advertising, consumption and climate change. The project is an ongoing enquiry into how people in advertising can use their imagination to build new visions of a sustainable good life, through workshops, experiences and creative work informed by citizens.
Other collaborative campaigns include Create and Strike, which encouraged 160 CEOs to allow staff to join the Student Climate Strikes in 2019, and The Great Reset in 2020, which won Best Collaborative Environmental Campaign at the Purpose Awards. In 2024, she founded the Agency for Nature, a creative agency for all life on Earth.
Lisa was named in the Forbes article '43 People Changing Advertising For The Climate' in 2022 and was one of Campaign magazine's Top 10 Trailblazers of the Year in 2021. In 2025 she was awarded BusinessGreen'sCommunications and Marketing Professional of the Year at the Women in Green Business Awards.
She has spoken at COP26 and Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and is a regular speaker, panellist and judge across the industry. She holds advisory positions with Media Trust, Weston Communicating Climate and the Centre for Sustainable Design, and is an assessor on the CISL course at Cambridge University.
Lisa has a husband, three children and a rescue greyhound, and lives in London spending as much time as possible in nature, particularly swimming in her local reservoir or taking her VW camper van to surfing spots across the country.