A Guide to Jeff Goodby & Rich Silverstein’s Ad Campaigns

Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein started the San Francisco-based advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) with Andy Berlin in 1983. Jeff Goodby grew up in Rhode Island and graduated from Harvard University. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Boston before getting his start in advertising at J. Walter Thompson.

Silverstein grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York, and graduated from the Parsons School of He moved between jobs, spending a year at a time as an art director for Rolling Stone magazine; Bozell & Jacobs; McCann Erickson; Foote, Cone & Belding; and finally Ogilvy and Mather, where he met Jeff Goodby and their vision of their own agency was born.

Since founding their agency, Jeff and Rich have been named Adweek’s “Executives of the Decade,” and their effect on advertising can be particularly felt in the leaders they have created and mentored, many of whom have successfully started their own agencies. In addition to being named “Agency of the Year” multiple times by many publications, GS&P has been repeatedly recognized for its ingenuity and innovation and was the first to be named “Interactive Agency of the Year” by both the Cannes Festival and Advertising Age.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) was founded in 1983. That same year the GS&P team won their first award from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for the Mill Valley Film Festival. Goodby and Silverstein went on to win Lions across every award and brand category, bridging an unprecedented variety of styles. Their work has included advertising campaigns like “got milk?,” the Budweiser lizards, Hewlett-Packard’s “Invent,” the E*Trade chimpanzee, Polaroid’s “See what develops,” the NBA’s “I love this game,” Nike’s “Skateboarding,” and SEGA’s “SEGA!”

Since 2000, GS&P has excelled at creating work that transcends media. In 2019, Goodby and Silverstein were honored with the Cannes Lion of St. Mark—the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Most recently the ad agency received Cannes Lions for “Lessons in Herstory” (an AR project that rewrites history to include women), “Dalí Lives” (a deepfake experience that brings Salvador Dalí back to life), “I Am a Witness” (the first emoji for a social cause), the “Dreams of Dalí” VR experience, Chevrolet’s Chevy Sonic launch with the rock band OK Go, and the Cheetos Museum.

GS&P’s 1993 “got milk?” ad campaign for The California Milk Processor Board is one of their most celebrated to date. The original ad dominated industry awards in 1994, winning the Silver Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and Gold at the 1994 Clio Awards. In 2009, the original television ad was inducted into the Clio Awards Hall of Fame. Here is an overview of how that campaign came to life.

• The idea: The seed of the idea for this campaign came out of a focus group run by one of GS&P's strategists at the time Jon Steel. Steel noticed that people resonated more with not having milk than with having it. Goodby and Silverstein saw a unique possibility to advertise the lack of a product, coming up with the now-famous tagline "got milk?" as a placeholder.
• The first TV spot: Jeff and Rich produced the first TV spot for the campaign in 1993 which was inspired by the deadly duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. The idea for the Aaron Burr commercial came from Scott Z. Burns, who saw Jeff reading a biography of Aaron Burr at the time. Bay directed a surreal and hyper-detailed commercial centered on an Aaron Burr scholar who blows his chance of winning $10,000 in a radio contest because he has no milk with which to wash down a peanut butter sandwich.
• “Got milk?” through the 1990s: Posters for the campaign featuring celebrities and models with a milk mustache were abundant in the 1990s. Over 350 "got milk?" posters were seen on television and in print and ran for two decades, featuring stars like Beyoncé Knowles, Britney Spears, Naomi Campbell, Serena Williams, and the Cookie Monster.

Here is an overview of some of Jeff and Rich’s work with GS&P.

1. 1. Chevy's Fresh Mex: Chevy's Fresh Mex is a chain of Mexican restaurants that made their food fresh every day, which Goodby and Silverstein used as the basis of their advertising concept. They made a number of flash advertisements that aired the same day they were made. This novel DIY approach made these TV spots stand out.
2. 2. The California Milk Processor Board, "got milk?": The now-famous tagline was originally a placeholder for a pitch meeting, but it stuck. The idea came about from focus group research, where test subjects mentioned that the only time they thought about buying milk was when they were out of milk.
3. 3. Nike, "Nike SB": To appeal to Nike's skateboarder market, GS&P came up with a campaign of TV spots in which athletes were treated like skateboarders, being stopped by the cops and given fines for playing tennis or jogging.
4. 4. SEGA, "SEGA!": Rich envisioned this campaign as a way to tap into the frenetic, high-energy video game generation. The ad ran for only three seconds, and Silverstein tasked an animation team with the job of creating the most expensive ad they could fit within that short amount of time.
5. 5. Logitech, "Kevin Bacon": The product, Logitech Revue, integrated PCs and TVs, and the idea for this advertisement played on the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" to highlight the Logitech Revue's ease of connecting. GS&P cast Kevin Bacon to play himself and a superfan in the TV spot.
6. 6. Budweiser, "Weird Without Beer": This commercial used all the tropes of classic beer commercials—men sitting together after work, inane masculine commentary—but replaced the beer with things like corn, highlighting the absurdity of beer commercials, making the viewer think of beer without even showing it.

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