Ad Icon: Jeff Goodby

For more than 30 years, Jeff Goodby co-founder and co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, has been creating virtuoso ads for a long list of iconic brands and was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2006. He feeds Simon Wakelin with nourishing campaign tales, particularly the one about marketing a certain popular bovine secretion.

“I love the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next,” says Jeff Goodby on what keeps him inspired in adland today. “I remember opening our agency with one phone sitting in the middle of the floor. Whenever it rang we’d all charge for it hoping it was new business – only to discover it was any number of friends calling us to see what we were up to.”

Waiting for God

Goodby grew up in Rhode Island with no intention of entering the world of advertising. Instead he headed to Harvard University, and wrote for The Harvard Lampoon while focusing on his studies:

“I used to love looking at magazines like Communication Arts because they simply inspired me,” he recalls. “After graduation I spent a few years as a political reporter in Boston before I decided to head out west to San Francisco.”

Goodby arrived looking for journalism work but couldn’t get a job. His frustrations led him to open the Yellow Pages and call every ad agency in town for a position. After no luck he sought the advice of a creative director at McCann Erickson who told him to display a sense of humour in his resumé. Along with a portfolio he crafted a compelling biography in the form of a mock encyclopedia entry, written posthumously.

“That was really good advice,” he admits. “It got me a job right away.”

His first job as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson lasted for a couple of years before receiving a phone call from the legendary Hal Riney one day. Goodby didn’t know who Riney was at the time until a fellow copywriter kicked him under the table and told him he’d “just received a phone call from God”.

 Opening up shop

Not surprisingly Goodby met up with Riney shortly thereafter, an encounter that led to a two-year stint working at Ogilvy & Mather.

It was there that Goodby met future partners, Rich Silverstein and Andy Berlin, and the trio brainstormed the concept of opening their own agency together. Goodby recalls they had a good deal of collective energy and shared goals:

“We all hung out because we were very interested in art projects. We opened the agency soon after meeting, around the same time as W+K and Fallon opened their doors.”

Goodby Berlin & Silverstein opened in 1983 [re-named Goodby Silverstein & Partners in 1994 after Berlin became chairman/CEO of Berlin Wright & Cameron in New York City]. The new boutique quickly drew attention after a three-minute, pro-bono cinema spot was released for the Mill Valley Film Festival. The docu-style short featured authentic townspeople debating the finer aspects of filmmaking in amusing scenes, such as a butcher discussing the art of editing while hacking apart chickens. The spot went on to nab top honours at Cannes. “It was free promotion that won everything and put the agency on the map,” admits Goodby on the work.

Innovative work for The San Francisco Chronicle followed, offbeat spots shot in black and white to garner an old-school feel.

“It was really ahead of its time,” explains Goodby. “We were very interested in shooting on videotape, projecting it on stucco walls and reshooting it before degrading it even more to look like old film.”

More clients followed such as Royal Viking Line and Norwegian Cruise Line:

“As an agency we began creating work outside of regular advertising,” recalls Goodby on winning new business. “We brought in so many influences from art, film and books. Rich [Silverstein] came from Rolling Stone magazine, I came from journalism. We were less ad junkies, more mass communication junkies. I think that was good for our heads.”

The Got Milk? Man

As the 1990s rolled in, GS&P hit its stride with the famous ‘Got Milk?’ campaign. At the time milk was losing its appeal to school kids and young adults alike, forcing the dairy industry to create the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) who hired Goodby to create ads that would win back milk’s appeal. Research led the agency to target a specific audience: people who were already milk drinkers. A successful, multi-faceted campaign followed, smartly educating consumers on the benefits of the beverage.

The beauty of the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign was its creative branding strategy – or, rather, its ‘milk-deprivation’ strategy, which recognised how milk hardly ever becomes a stand-alone beverage – that its consumption is permanently linked to various meals, snacks and food throughout the day. It also highlighted how the only time we care passionately about milk is when we run out of it.

‘Got Milk?’ was also a timeless slogan, capping a campaign that forged a deep, emotional connection with the audience.

“More often than not slogans come from the work that you place around them,” Goodby says. “Rich tells people all the time that he hated ‘Got Milk?’ when he first heard it, but then he saw the work wrapped around the tagline and liked it. The slogan seemed banal to him until the work gave it context.”

Budweiser was another big client that Goodby speaks of with warm regard. He notes a handful of campaigns including the humorous Super Bowl work starring vengeful lizards Louis and Frankie – two envious reptiles lamenting the fact that Bud chose the ‘Wassup’ frogs instead of them.

“They let the work happen,” notes Goodby describing open and willing communication with Anheuser-Busch. “Those spots made fun of Bud and mocked the overblown slickness of advertising. They also acknowledged brand suspicion in the consumer’s mind – that Budweiser was too big, too generic and simply spent too much money on ads. It was work that used negative space in a good way to get positive results. It made the brand even bigger because it openly acknowledged Bud’s weaknesses.”

Client HP also profited from Goodby’s unique ideas in tandem with innovative visual effects, techniques and artistry that played out in advertisements such as Picture Book, an irresistible spot that made it appear as though people could pull pictures out of thin air. With so much progressive work under Goodby’s belt I ask Goodby if he feels advertising is, in essence, merely artificial truth?

“Absolutely not,” he answers. “Just because people get caught up in the notion that advertising is a sophisticated way of lying, doesn’t mean it’s fake.”

Honest Handling

“The best campaigns are those based on honesty, on true things about the product,” he continues. “That’s the genius of Nike. At some point they went, ‘Hey, let’s stop talking about shoes that make you jump higher and talk about the athletes that use our products’. Humanising Nike made all the difference.”

“Take the simplicity of Apple; people want their computers to be easy to use, so Apple wears that knowledge like a badge. People understand the simple elegance of the product. That’s a truth. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. With ‘Got Milk?’ it was the same. We didn’t deal with telling lies. Instead, the work just said, ‘hey, don’t run out of milk’ and people related to that.”

Though it no longer holds the account for GM, GS&P’s work for Chevy in 2011 and 2012 displayed an innovative spirit with a campaign designed to attract a younger generation of car buyers who saw the car manufacturer as an irrelevant, old-school truck company. The campaign featured innovative 3D technology allowing people to interact directly with the Chevy Sonic at exciting, live events. Outlandish stunts were also created – such as Chevy’s very first bungee jump – all to portray the Chevy as an adventurous spirit echoing the mindset of the millennial generation. 

Most visceral of all was Skydive in 2011, a spot that used 27 cameras to follow a team of professional skydivers rigging a Chevy Sonic to fall to the Arizona desert from the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Transport Aircraft. The Chevy Sonic rolled out of the plane at 14,000 feet in balletic fashion, free-falling to earth in spectacular form, seeming to share the feeling of weightlessness and reckless abandon of the accompanying skydivers. Beautifully composed music and sound design by Matt Joynt at Plied Sound accompanied the stunt, which helped to place the Sonic on an adventurous pedestal, successfully promoting the Chevy brand to a hip, young audience. The work raised the bar in a tired automobile genre, sidestepping customary clichés normally associated with car advertising.

When asked how Goodby continues to create branding in non-jaundiced ways, he answers that it’s simply a matter of honesty:

“Be really hard on yourself,” he says. “Choose ideas that reiterate what people already feel about the brand or about themselves. Then talk to people face-to-face to measure if your ideas are surprising. As an ad culture we fall in love with our ideas, but when you talk to a real person you immediately see if it’s interesting to them.”

Media Management

As for new media and digital channels, Goodby admits that many clients are still adjusting.

“It’s not so obvious to them anymore how they should spend their money,” he reveals. “A lot of them freeze in the headlights and don’t spend at all which is a problem for all of us.”

I ask if shorter timelines and quick turnarounds have also thwarted the creative process?

“In the modern world we do so much work so quickly that it’s definitely brutalising the process and taking a toll on the quality of the work,” he answers.

“It’s impossible to start over again when you discover things aren’t going well, so the work you create is like fixing a flat tyre; you put a patch on it and squeeze out as many miles as you can. Everybody loses out because the process of starting over and throwing everything away just can’t be done. That’s something that gives you perspective on what you’re creating.”

Goodby also notes that a steady flow of well-defined work needs to be implemented to secure an agency’s success and keep it from slipping into obscurity:

“One of the things people forget about in today’s world is consistency,” he posits. “A lot of agencies just don’t have that ability. They do work that seems interesting for their clients but it’s stuff that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the brand’s identity.”

Meanwhile, Goodby agrees that his agency’s culture is an integral part of its success. But how do you attain and sustain that culture?

“You have to curate pretty aggressively to keep your culture intact,” answers Goodby. “It’s something you constantly work on. All the great agencies do that. Dan Wieden does a terrific job curating both a feel and a look to his agency year after year.”

With a new office that opened in New York this year, I ask if there is still a divide between the East and West Coast in terms of creativity?

“I would like to believe that there is more artistic freedom on the West Coast, but I think the divide is disappearing,” he offers. “There was a time when New York was the birth place of all things creative, then it became more business-oriented and guys like Riney, Wieden and Clow picked up the slack.”

As for the future, Goodby says the challenge remains the same. “We are all in the pursuit of creating work that makes others say, ‘holy shit, I wish I’d created that’,” he laughs.

“Even though it’s harder than ever, in our complicated digital age, to determine what a great piece of advertising is, I relish the opportunity to continue making consistently great work for brands and their incredibly media-savvy audiences.”