Creative

Clients

About

We are a creative company that puts people at the center of everything we do. We work with both clients and consumers in an atmosphere of honesty and truth, wiping away preconceptions and learning together.

Our mission is to create experiences that reach millions and even billions, but seem to speak only to you. We call this effect mass intimacy.

The smarter, braver work that results from this approach brings people closer to our clients’ businesses, gets them to care, and urges them to take action. Because great work is only great if it reaps results.

People

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  Jeff Goodby

  Co-Chairman/Partner

  Jeff, along with his friend Rich, started this whole thing.
  
  Jeff grew up in Rhode Island and graduated from Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Boston, and his illustrations have been published in TIME, Mother Jones and Harvard Magazine.
  
  He began his advertising career at J. Walter Thompson and was lucky enough to meet the legendary Hal Riney, whom he still thinks of as his mentor, at Ogilvy & Mather. It was with Riney that Goodby learned his reverence for surprise, humor, craft and restraint.
  
  He also met a guy named Rich Silverstein at Ogilvy & Mather. They founded GS&P in 1983. Since then, the two have won just about every advertising award imaginable.
  
  And yes, Jeff was the guy who originally wrote “got milk?” on a napkin.
  
  He is also a director, and two of his commercials were selected to be among the top 30 advertising films of the 1990s by The One Club.
  
  In 2006 he was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.
  
  He continues to believe that his success is a happy confluence of his mother, a painter; his father, a Wharton graduate; and his family, a constant reminder of irony and humility.
  
  Jeff lives in Oakland, California, with his family, a dog, a cat, a rabbit, three horses and probably some other things he doesn’t know about.
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  Rich Silverstein

  Co-Chairman/Partner

  Rich, along with his friend Jeff, started this whole thing.
  
  Rich grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York. After graduating from the Parsons School of Design in New York City, he moved to San Francisco against his father’s wishes.
  
  He worked as an art director in one-year increments for Rolling Stone magazine; Bozell & Jacobs; McCann Erickson; Foote, Cone & Belding; and Ogilvy & Mather, where he met Jeff Goodby and finally settled down. They founded GS&P in 1983 and have won just about every advertising award imaginable.
  
  In 2002 he was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and, two years later, into The One Club Creative Hall of Fame. Along with his partner Jeff, he was named Executive of the Decade by Adweek.
  
  Rich sets a standard of design that has led the agency to compete against the country’s leading design studios. His passion is evident whether he’s crafting client work, creating his own work, working with artist Robert Wilson on his Watermill Center or visually blogging for the Huffington Post.
  
  He serves on the board of Specialized Bicycles, and though he recently retired from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy board after 15 years, he continues to develop work for them that keeps their brand the envy of our country’s park system.
  
  Rich lives in San Francisco with his wife, Carla Emil, and Felix the cat. He has two grown kids, Aaron and Simone, and is a proud grandfather to Maple, Will, Owen and Emma.
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  Derek Robson

  President/Partner

  Derek started his career in direct marketing at Ogilvy & Mather Direct in London, initially as an account manager and then as an account planner. He was the first account planner in London to move from a direct-marketing agency to a traditional advertising agency.
  
  He moved from Ogilvy & Mather to Bartle Bogle Hegarty, where he spent the next 13 years of his career as the agency’s deputy planning director and then as managing director, working on Levi’s, Xbox, Murphy’s Irish Stout, Boddingtons Pub Ale, Audi UK, K Shoes, Levi’s Japan, Cointreau, the Independent and Independent on Sunday (newspapers), Cadbury (Boost, Picnic and Roses), Hugo Boss, Coca-Cola and Google.
  
  Under his leadership, the agency twice won Campaign magazine’s Agency of the Year award, and the agency grew its income by 30%. As a result he was, rather comically, voted one of the 40 most influential men under 40 in 2004 by Esquire in the UK. Somehow he was more influential than Jenson Button and Christian Bale.
  
  Derek joined GS&P in 2005 and helped the agency to position itself for the future, restructuring GS&P for the digital age, which resulted in several Agency of the Year and Digital Agency of the Year awards from 2006 to 2010.He works on XFINITY, SONIC Drive-In, Foster Farms, and is responsible for the agency’s strategic functions and finances.
  
  Derek lives in a house in Tiburon with his wife, Sarnia, and his two daughters, Millie and Evie, and a cat named Teddy.
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  Margaret Johnson

  Chief Creative Officer/Partner

  After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in journalism and mass communication, Margaret earned a degree in art direction at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
  
  Her early advertising career included stops at Leonard, Monahan, Lubars & Kelly in Providence, Rhode Island, where she cut her teeth on accounts like Polaroid and Keds tennis shoes, and at The Richards Group in Dallas, Texas, where she worked on Id Software, creators of video games like Doom and Quake. She launched lots of games with monsters, screaming faces and dead bodies.
  
  In 1996 Margaret received a call from GS&P. She packed up and headed west. In the years since, she’s worked on just about every account in the building: SONIC Drive-In, TD Ameritrade, Häagen-Dazs, HP, Logitech, Nintendo, Specialized, Foster Farms, Budweiser, Yahoo! and Nest, to name a few. She was made a partner at GS&P in 2012.
  
  She’s won awards at every major show, including The One Show’s first-ever Green Pencil for the Häagen-Dazs “HD Loves HB” campaign in 2009, the 2010 Kelly Awards Grand Prize for the Häagen-Dazs “Five” campaign, a 2011 Cannes Cyber Lion for the Yahoo! outdoor interactive “Bus Stop Derby” and two 2011 Lions for the Logitech “Ivan Cobenk” spot, which was included as one of the CLIO Awards’ 100 all-time “World’s Best Commercials.”
  
  Business Insider named her one of the “Most Powerful Women in Advertising” in 2012.
  
  In 2008 she produced and directed Dunkumentary, which was featured in the Short Film Corner at Cannes. She also blogs about things she sees out of her car window and is writing a book with her husband about not losing touch with the cool, dynamic person you were before you had kids…which they started seven years ago, before they had kids.
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  Leslie Barrett

  Managing Partner

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  Brian McPherson

  Managing Partner

  For 20 years, Brian has been happy to call GS&P home.
  
  Over that time he has led accounts in nearly every major category, from banking to telecom to technology to packaged goods and most things in between. He has been involved in work that has won many times over for creativity at Cannes as well as for effectiveness at the Effies. He currently leads the Frito-Lay and Adobe accounts at GS&P and is particularly proud of these long-standing client relationships of more than 10 years each.
  
  Since 2007 Brian has also run the account management department. He enjoys overseeing the direction of the department, developing its people and recruiting and training new talent. He’s interested in how advertising is evolving and what that means for modern-day account work. He has written often about both subjects in a number of industry publications, including Ad Age.
  
  Brian considers himself lucky to have grown up at GS&P, where he scored his first job after completing his MBA in marketing and finance from the University of Arizona and his undergraduate degree from Queen’s University in Canada.
  
  Outside of work he spends his days in Mill Valley with his wife, Kate; his golden retriever, Moose (who, they swore, would never sleep on the bed but does); and his newborn son, Henry.
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  Bonnie Wan

  Director of Brand Strategy/Partner

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  Christine Chen

  Director of Communication Strategy/Partner