Leslie
Barrett

President and Partner

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Leslie moved to the US at the age of 13. She began her advertising career at Anderson & Lembke, where she worked on Microsoft for three years.

During her 20-year tenure at GS&P, she has led the Wall Street Journal, HP, Emerald Nuts, Subway, Denny’s, Logitech, TD Ameritrade, Nickelodeon, SONIC Drive-Ins, Häagen-Dazs and One Medical accounts.

Barrett leads many of the agency’s most pivotal clients and her teams have consistently developed work awarded for both creativity and effectiveness. She currently oversees the BMW, HP, XFINITY, Comcast Business, Oura, Sam Adams, Truly, Califia Farms, and Lidl accounts, among others. Her client retention rates have fueled the agency’s average client tenure of seven years.

Barrett has been instrumental in agency growth as she has led several of the agency’s new business wins and, as a result, became director of new business in 2014 and named partner in 2016.

She is an aggressive business builder, champion of innovation and a leader dedicated to employee well-being. She thrives on making work that reflects the audiences that we have the privilege of representing and drives true business impact, which contributed to her being named the third president in the agency’s history in 2023.

She lives with her two daughters in Mill Valley. It’s beautiful, but it’s no Switzerland.

Margaret
Johnson

Chief Creative Officer & Partner

Margaret is a 25-year veteran of GS&P and leads the agency’s creative department, a position she assumed in 2015 after being named a partner in 2012. In 2016 she was named the agency’s first chief creative officer.

Under her leadership, Fast Company named GS&P #36 Most Innovative Company in the World and the Most Innovative Ad Agency of the Year, and Campaign magazine named GS&P Agency of the Year. Over the years she has been named one of the industry’s top chief creative officers by Ad Age, Forbes, Business Insider, Adweek and The Drum.

Jeff
Goodby

Co-Chairman and 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. It was with Riney at Ogilvy & Mather that Goodby learned his reverence for surprise, humor, craft and restraint.

He also met Rich Silverstein there. They founded GS&P in 1983 with a founding client they renamed Electronic Arts. Since then, the two have won just about every advertising award imaginable.

And yes, Jeff was the guy who originally wrote “got milk?”

He is also a director and has delivered the director’s address at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers. His work has been memorialized in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

In 2006 he was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, and in 2019 he and Rich received the Cannes Lion of St. Mark Award for lifetime achievement. In 2020 the two starred in an 18-part MasterClass online learning series.

Jeff has always held that the best advertising is like vandalism—loud, funny and still there the next day. It’s a topic that has earned international attention, in a talk first given at Cannes and then at comparable creative events in London, Sydney, New York City and Boston.

He continues to believe that his success is a happy confluence of his mother (a painter), his father (a Wharton graduate) and the rest of his family, who have always been a constant reminder of irony and humility.

He lives in Oakland, California, with a dog, a cat, three horses and probably some other things he doesn’t know about.

Rich
Silverstein

Co-Chairman and 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 Jeff he was named Executive of the Decade by Adweek. In 2019 he and Jeff were anointed with the Cannes Lion of St. Mark lifetime-achievement award, and in 2020 the duo starred in an 18-part MasterClass online learning series.

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 on projects for the Center for Investigative Reporting or visually blogging for the Huffington Post. In 2021 he created I Read the News Today Oh Boy, a solo presentation. The exhibition featured a series of works that Rich made reflecting on the Trump era, created by using text and images that he hand-ripped from the New York Times.

Rich 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.

Christine
Chen

Partner, Head of Communication Strategy

Christine leads Communication Strategy and Analytics, combining communications, branding and data.

A 17-year veteran at GS&P, she has earned the agency a reputation for innovation and has created new, first-time uses of ad-tech platforms. As a result, in 2021, Ad Age named her a finalist for Chief Strategist of the Year.

Christine is a firm believer in active ideas and in creating advertising that generously invites consumers to add their own stories to the narrative. In 2020 her team partnered with the Sway app to enable consumers to dance as Sam Elliott and Lil Nas X did in the 2020 Super Bowl spot “Old Town Road”—a partnership that resulted in the app’s being propelled from obscurity to number three in the App Store. Christine’s team innovated YouTube’s sequential ad product via Life Below Water, a film narrated by Morgan Freeman that shows how, by the year 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than there are fish. The sequential feature empowered people to control the storytelling.

Christine nurtures innovative uses of technology to better the world. In 2020 her teams created the Respond2Racism Twitter bot, which harnesses AI to automatically respond to COVID-19-related racist tweets with videos that both educate perpetrators and uplift Asian frontline workers. Christine played a pivotal role in the “Not a Gun” campaign for Courageous Conversation. One of the highlights of the campaign was a print ad turned protest sign for Tulsa protesters that ran in the oldest black-owned newspaper in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Eagle, during then president Trump’s 2020 Juneteenth visit.

Christine lives in Oakland with her husband, her two sons and her dog, Homer.

Bonnie
Wan

Partner, Head of Brand Strategy

Bonnie, partner and head of brand strategy at GS&P, is reimagining the reach and role of strategy for brands as well as for everyday people.

Since coming to the agency in 1998, Bonnie has expanded GS&P’s strategic offerings to include new revenue streams, offerings such as Brand Camp, a concentrated, radically collaborative, six-week strategy sprint that helps client leadership teams author and align around ownable, actionable brand strategies. Brand Camp gives clients a safe space in which to get honest and make the tough yet necessary trade-offs that open the way for sharp and standout strategies.

Originally developed for start-ups in 2016, Brand Camp is driving much of GS&P’s growth. The model has expanded GS&P’s ability to attract businesses of all sizes and stages, to engage brands across client portfolios and to offer a new way for companies to harness GS&P’s strategic expertise.

Recognized by Ad Age and Campaign as a finalist for Chief Strategist of the Year in 2019 and 2020, Bonnie has also been the lead on projects that have resulted in some of GS&P’s most notable work. Recently this has included Comcast/Xfinity’s holiday work starring Steve Carell, HP’s “Windows of Hope” campaign and the agency’s work combating police brutality, racial injustice and violence against Asians through the “Not a Gun” campaign and the innovative “Respond2Racism” Twitter activation.

Beyond the industry at large, Bonnie is using strategy to transform how everyday people approach life. As the creator of “The Life Brief,” Bonnie helps people live with greater clarity, creativity and courage by teaching them how to write briefs for their lives. “The Life Brief” is a practice based on her belief that “you cannot have it all, but you can have all that matters.”

“The Life Brief” has evolved from an agency talk into a workbook, workshops and recurring speaking appearances at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, Jane Goodall’s Activating Hope summit, the 3% Conference, SXSW, Bain & Company and Change.org. Most recently, Simon & Schuster has signed on to publish The Life Brief as a book.

She lives in San Anselmo, California, with her husband and four kids.

Brian
McPherson

Managing Partner

Brian is the managing partner at GS&P.

Brian went to Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and then went back to school in Arizona to get an MBA in marketing and finance. He liked the marketing a little better than finance and has been in advertising—and at GS&P—ever since.

He has led accounts in most categories—packaged goods, telecom, technology and a lot of things in between. He’s proud of his long-standing client relationships and loves to figure out how to remove the often stubborn barriers to doing better work for clients. He also oversees both the Account Management and Production departments at GS&P, including the agency’s maker functions.

He lives in Marin with his very, very, very funny wife, Kate (who insisted on all those verys), along with his three wonderful kids—Henry, George and Poppy—and his entitled dog, Moose.

Dr. Jennifer
Gomes

Head of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Associate Partner

For more than 20 years, Dr. Gomes has committed her career to addressing issues of social justice. At GS&P, Dr. Gomes works closely with the partners to create and execute a vision of equity, diversity and inclusion for client work and the GS&P employee experience. Currently, Dr. Gomes impacts more than 70% of the work created at GS&P, including GS&P’s annual Superbowl work. Prior to joining GS&P, she was the founder and CEO of Positioned Inc., a company that developed, supported and empowered women of color in leadership positions and partnered with leadership teams to actualize and operationalize their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments. Dr. Gomes has experience working in the nonprofit sector and extensive experience teaching and leading at the graduate and undergraduate levels. 

She earned her EdD in organizational change and leadership from the University of Southern California and her BA from Scripps College.

Cory
Berger

Chief Growth Officer, Associate Partner

Cory is an industry leader who has spent his 20-year career leading and growing some of the world’s best creative agencies.

As GS&P’s first Chief Growth Officer, Associate Partner, Cory oversees growth for both the SF and NY offices. Previously Global CMO and Chief Growth Officer of Grey Group, Cory was part of the executive team that helped transform the global network (and in 2021) led Grey to its biggest new business year in a decade - ultimately being named Ad Age’s Comeback Agency of the Year. Prior to Grey, Cory opened and led the New York office of indie agency, Pereira O’Dell for six years leading the agency to significant growth and accolades.

Cory is a huge sports fan and was recently selected alongside an esteemed group of business leaders to the Board of Advisors of The Earl Monroe New Renaissance School of Basketball, a new NYC-based Charter School for underprivileged kids in the Bronx.

David
Spencer

Chief Financial Officer

David has been the CFO of Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco since April 2016. Previously, he was at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London for 21 years, 14 of which was as CFO. He has extensive experience of driving growth, margin delivery and change management throughout his career and has fostered many strong and long-lasting relationships at all levels of the business, clients and suppliers, alike.  Prior to relocating to the US, David graduated on the GoogleSquared Digital Marketing leadership course. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Jill
Sammons

Head of People

Jill Sammons is head of people at GS&P, where she oversees culture, recruiting, learning and development.

A 20-year veteran of GS&P, Jill began her career in media and then moved on to account management on some of the agency’s most important accounts at the time, including HP. Her rich background, outstanding relationship-building skills and natural ability as a leader made her the clear choice as the agency’s first head of people.   

Jill’s focus is helping people get the most out of their experience at GS&P. She provides the scaffolding to ensure that people thrive and grow so that they want to stay with the agency for a very long time. She has led GS&P to historic talent-retention rates, and as a result, her team was recognized as one of the best talent teams in the US by Campaign magazine.