Jeffrey Goodby

Board Member

Jeffrey Goodby, of Oakland, California, is a writer, artist, printmaker, musician, and co-founder of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, the company that Adweek magazine chose as Agency of the Decade in 2010. He has created a number of successful brands in liquor and food, and inadvisedly climbed the cables to the top of the Bay Bridge in 2014. 

His advertising agency has been Agency of the Year in Advertising Age, Adweek, and Creativity magazines several times each, and has also been selected as Digital Agency of the Year in Advertising Age, Business 2.0, and by the One Club of New York. The firm is widely acclaimed for most successfully integrating traditional and digital media arts.

Many of GS&P’s campaigns, including commercials Goodby directed – got milk?, the Budweiser Lizards, Hewlett-Packard “Invent,” the National Basketball Association’s “I Love This Game,” and the E*TRADE chimpanzee among them – are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1998, Goodby gave the annual Association of Commercial Producers address there.  In 2006, he was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame. The 2014 documentary, “Art & Copy,” featured Goodby among a pantheon of advertising greats of the past century.  He has written widely about business and advertising for Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Advertising Age. 

Jeff is also an illustrator whose work has appeared in Time and Mother Jones.  He has created a number of notable artistic installations, including the widely acclaimed “Poemhouse” in 2012. Goodby graduated from Harvard and worked for several years as a political reporter in Boston. He began his advertising career at J. Walter Thompson and was lucky enough to meet the legendary Hal Riney at Ogilvy & Mather, whom he still thinks of as his mentor. It was with Riney that Goodby learned his reverence for surprise, humor, craft, and restraint. He continues to believe that his success is a happy confluence of his mother, a painter, his father, a Wharton graduate, and his family, a constant reminder of irony and humility.

He serves on the boards of the Salvador Dali Museum, Audubon USA, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.  In the past, he has been on boards ranging from Macromedia to the Art Center College of Design. Jeff lives in Oakland, California, with his family, a dog, a cat, three horses, and probably some other things he doesn’t know about.