Have We Really Come a Long Way, Baby?

Susan Hoffman

Susan Hoffman is Executive Creative Director, at Wieden + Kennedy. Susan started her career as an art director at Pihas, Schmidt, Westerdahl before moving to TBWA\Chiat\Day in Seattle. Three years later she came to Wieden+Kennedy as employee No. 8 and has spent the last 27 years defining the agency’s culture and setting the bar for creative excellence.

Susan has a tendency to shake things up a bit. That's probably because she finds the status quo boring. Case in point, a walk past the Dakota building in New York City inspired her choice of The Beatles song “Revolution” for the Nike spot of the same name. She’s injected her unique perspective into some of the most memorable ads W+K has produced for virtually every client we’ve ever had. Susan is never satisfied unless the work feels fresh and interesting.

Since David Kennedy’s “retirement” in 1993, Susan has provided the visual yin to Dan Wieden’s storytelling yang. She’s worked as a creative director, opened both our Amsterdam and London offices, serving both as executive creative director, and ran Wieden+Kennedy 12, our experimental ad school. Along the way she’s introduced the world to directors like David Fincher and Michael Bay and helped launch the careers of many of the most successful creative directors in the industry.

In her current role as executive creative director of the flagship office, she’s tasked with preserving what makes this agency special, continuing to nurture the creative talent within our walls and pushing forward to find new and different ways of working and thinking.

Margaret Johnson

Margaret Johnson is Executive Creative Director and Associate Partner at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in journalism and mass communication, Margaret took a hard right and pursued an art direction degree at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, GA. Her first job was freelancing for a small advertising agency in Providence, Rhode Island called Leonard, Monahan, Lubars & Kelly where she cut her teeth on accounts like Polaroid and Keds tennis shoes.

A few months later, she decided to pack up and head for the Lone Star State. She took a job at The Richards Group in Dallas, Texas where she worked on Id Software, creators of video games like “Doom” and “Quake.” She launched lots of games with imagery of monsters, screaming faces and dead bodies. She also produced work for Continental Airlines and Humvee (you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger drives one).

A couple years later, she received a call from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. She packed up and headed west again. In twelve years, she’s worked on just about every account in the building– Sonic, Häagen-Dazs, Logitech, Nintendo, Specialized, hp, Foster Farms and Budweiser, just to name a few.

When she’s not working, she enjoys running, kickboxing, movies and traveling. In 2008 she completed her first film, Dunkumentary, which was part of the Short Film Corner at Cannes.

Cynthia Maller