25 years of Lion-winners from Goodby Silverstein & Partners

“Jeff and Rich have had such a profound influence, not only through their much celebrated and creatively ground-breaking work but also by inspiring others to create great work too. Their legacy is truly remarkable.” Philip Thomas, Chairman, Cannes Lions

After meeting at Ogilvy & Mather under Hal Riney, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein started GS&P with Andy Berlin in 1983 and won their first Cannes Lion for the Mill Valley Film Festival. They went on to win numerous Lions across all metals and brand categories, encompassing an unprecedented variety of styles.

Named Adweek’s Executives of the Decade, Jeff and Rich have had an effect on advertising that can be seen particularly in the leaders they have created and mentored, many of whom have successfully started their own agencies. GS&P’s creative alumni include Gerry Graf (founder of Barton F. Graf), Fred Raillard and Farid Mokart (of Fred & Farid), Paul Venables (founder of Venables Bell & Partners), Jamie Barrett (founder of barrettSF) and leaders like Chris Beresford-Hill (CCO of TBWAChiatDay New York), Steve Simpson (CCO of Ogilvy & Mather North America), and Karin Onsager-Birch (CCO of FCB West).

Ahead of their appearance at Cannes Lions 2019, the pair went back through our digital archive of award-winning ideas to pick out a few memorable campaigns from their back catalogue.

At the start of 2016, Cheetos® was a category leader but faced pressure and needed to find new ways to grow. Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ challenge was to unlock an entirely new reason for people to buy the product again. They did so in the most inventive way imaginable.

To increase national awareness of The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, Goodby Silverstein & Partners created an interactive experience that took viewers inside the surrealist master’s mind. The five-minute online experience garnered over two million views without any media dollars.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners wanted to help everyone understand what entertainment is like for a person with disabilities. So they asked Emily, a little girl who is blind, what she sees when she watches her favourite movie, The Wizard of Oz. They then worked with Emily to bring her vision to life and debuted the film at The Oscars.

This bizarre radio campaign imagined the fastest thing possible to demonstrate just how fast Comcast’s internet services are.

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/thank-you-creativity

In this spot, people are shown in car-like situations but without cars - a car pool, a school bus, a traffic jam, a speeding ticket, a right turn on a red. It was designed to showcase how Saturn approached cars by thinking first about the people that may one day drive them.

During Superbowl season, Goodby Silverstein and Partners came up with this highly amusing piece of work. In this 2000 TV spot, a monkey and two old men spend thirty seconds dancing, off-beat, to La Coucaracha. “Well, we just wasted 2 million bucks,” the ad says. “What are you doing with your money?”

This comes from Bud’s popular, long-term swampland series which started back in 1995 during the SuperBowl. The series ran for many years and ‘Bad Day to be a Frog’ is viewed as one of the most iconic.

This piece of work explores the stigma attached to the sport of skateboarding. “What if we treated all athletes the way we treated skateboarders?”. This infamous spot was designed to capture the heart and minds of a younger generation of consumer and bring new appeal to the brand.

The words “Got Milk?” rippled throughout the world in 1993 when Goodby Silverstein and Partners came out with the iconic Got Milk spot. In this piece of work a hapless historian answers a trivia question worth $10,000 with an unlikely response...