Goodby, Silverstein & Partners adds Margaret Johnson to partners

On Friday afternoon, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners announced Margaret Johnson, Executive Creative Director and 16-year veteran of the agency, has been named a partner. She is the first new partner since Jerry Barnhart (2009), the first female partner in the agency’s history and the first new creative partner in over a decade, a true testament to her unique contributions to GSP and the industry as a whole.

As Co-Chairman and Creative Director Jeff Goodby said in an internal memo, “Margaret was an easy choice. There is no one quite like her. She is prolific, has tremendous range and great taste. Her work ranges from beautiful and heartfelt to edgy and funny, from digits on TV to digits online. She’s collaborative, humble, and generous with her ideas and help. Her integrity is unquestioned.”

Margaret has worked on just about every account at GSP — SONIC, Häagen-Dazs, Logitech, Nintendo, Specialized, hp, Foster Farms, Budweiser and Nest, just to name a few. Over the years, she’s won awards in every major show, including the One Show’s first-ever Green Pencil for the hyper-integrated 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” as well as 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” earlier this year.

Margaret Johnson
Executive Creative Director, Associate Partner
After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in journalism and mass communication, Margaret earned an art direction degree at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Her first job was freelancing for Leonard, Monahan, Lubars & Kelly in Providence, Rhode Island, where she cut her teeth on accounts like Polaroid and Keds tennis shoes. Next, she took a job 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 imagery of monsters, screaming faces and dead bodies.
A couple of years later, she received a call from Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. She packed up and headed west again. In sixteen years, she’s worked on just about every account in the building— SONIC, Häagen-Dazs, Logitech, Nintendo, Specialized, hp, Foster Farms, Budweiser and Nest, just to name a few. And over the years, she’s won awards in every major show, including the One Show’s first-ever Green Pencil for the hyper-integrated 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” as well as 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” earlier this year.
When she’s not working, she enjoys being with her two kids, running, movies and traveling. In 2008 she produced and directed Dunkumentary, which was featured in the Short Film Corner at Cannes.