About me
Margaret Johnson is a 24-year veteran of Goodby Silverstein & Partners and leads the agency's Creative department as chief creative officer, a position she rose to in 2015.
Johnson's signature creative product is innovative work with a humanitarian edge. Over the last year Johnson's teams tackled two of the most important issues affecting society today: police brutality against black people ("Not a Gun") and COVID-19-related racism toward Asian Americans ("Respond2Racism"). To shed light on environmental issues resulting from the pandemic, she led the creation of Google and the UN's Life Below Water, exposing the prediction that by the year 2050, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. On the Monday after Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's acceptance speeches, her teams introduced HP's Madam President, a film that features four young people envisioning a future in which a woman becomes president.
With innovation at its core, Johnson's Creative department embarked on a number of firsts on some of advertising's biggest stages in 2020. GS&P fueled PepsiCo's greatest sales gains ever with four ads in the 2020 Super Bowl: "Can't Touch This" for Cheetos, starring MC Hammer; "Cool Ranch" for Doritos, featuring a dance-off between Sam Elliott and Lil Nas X; "Water on Mars" for SodaStream; and a Pepsi Zero Sugar spot starring Missy Elliott and H.E.R.
In particular, the Doritos "Cool Ranch" ad spread to propel an obscure AR app, Sway, to number 3 in the App Store. For Cheetos, Johnson's teams turned something that consumers found annoying (Cheetle) into a product (Cheetos Popcorn) they couldn't get enough of. As a result of the Super Bowl campaign, the new product, Cheetos Popcorn, achieved record sales.
2021 was one of Goodby Silverstein & Partners' most successful awards seasons, as the agency won across a staggering 10 client accounts and scored the highest number of ANDY Awards for a single office and the second-highest ADC nominations for a single office. Additionally her team won the Cannes Grand Prix for Cheetos "Can't Touch This."
Perhaps most importantly, 2020 demonstrated how much her team loves working for Johnson, as staff turnover in the Creative department was only 3 percent.
As a result, in 2021 Ad Age and Campaign named Johnson "Chief Creative Officer of the Year," and Fast Company ranked the agency the #1 "Most Innovative Ad Agency" and 36th "Most Innovative Company" in the world.