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

Tags:: 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

Tags:: San Francisco, Partner

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.

Tags:: San Francisco, Partner

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.

Tags:: Partner