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.

Twitter:

@brianfromcanada

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San Francisco, Partner

Leslie Barrett

Managing 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, SBC, HP, Emerald Nuts, Subway, Denny’s, Logitech, TD Ameritrade, Nickelodeon, SONIC Drive-Ins and Häagen-Dazs accounts. 

Barrett’s teams have consistently developed work awarded for both creativity and effectiveness. She currently oversees the BMW, HP, Comcast/Xfinity, PayPal and One Medical accounts, among others.

Over the years Barrett has led a number of the agency’s new business wins and, as a result, became director of new business in 2014. She was named a partner in 2016.

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

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San Francisco, Partner

Margaret Johnson

Chief Creative Officer and 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, GS&P was named the “Most Innovative Advertising Agency” and the 36th “Most Innovative Company” in the world by Fast Company in 2021, “Agency of the Year” by Campaign and Forbes with Ad Age picking the agency as a runner-up to “Agency of the Year” in 2019 and 2020. In 2021 Ad Age crowned Margaret “Chief Creative Officer of the Year” and Campaign named Margaret “Creative Person of the Year.” Over the years, she has been recognized as one of the industry’s top chief creative officers by Forbes, Business Insider, Adweek and The Drum.

Margaret serves on the board of the One Show, was a founding member of the 3% conference and co-founded non-profit Daughters of the Evolution with her daughter, Vivian, who was nine years-old at the time. In 2019, the non-profit created Lessons in HerStory, an app that was launched at SXSW and uses augmented reality to celebrate stories of women typically omitted from history textbooks. Over the past year, the app won every coveted creative award, including Gold Cannes Lions and the prestigious White Pencil at D&AD. 

Twitter:

@maggiejca

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San Francisco, Partner

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.

Twitter:

@JeffBadby

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San Francisco, Partner