His first experience with public service advertising came in 1973 when America adopted an All-Volunteer defense concept instead of conscription. As a field advertising director with Grey Advertising on the U.S. Navy Recruiting Command account, his primary responsibility was to help the Navy increase its visibility in the Mid-Atlantic Region. He worked with over 400 Navy recruiters teaching them the basics of public service advertising which was the primary outreach vehicle used at the time. From that position he was promoted to the Command’s headquarters in Arlington, VA where he was responsible for getting creative projects approved by Navy’s manpower program managers for a $27 million advertising account.

From that position, Mr. Goodwill joined Grey’s Washington, DC office where he was the deputy director of the drunk-driving countermeasures program working under contract with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation. Better known as the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” campaign, it became one of the most successful social issues marketing programs in history in terms of bringing about desired social change. In addition to anti-drunk driving, he also became involved in campaigns to increase safety belt usage and the 55-mile per hour speed limit as editor of a monthly newsletter, the Highway Safety Communicator.

Based on his expertise in developing successful local outreach efforts, Bill was once again promoted to an account supervisor in Grey’s New York office where he developed a co-op advertising program for the Photo Products Division of Canon, USA. Grey was the first agency to use sports celebrities to help promote its cameras and the co-op ad program that Bill developed generated substantial revenue for the agency while providing an incentive for local camera dealers to sell Canon cameras.

Subsequent to this experience, Mr. Goodwill returned to Washington, DC where he became a Vice President, Account Supervisor at HJK&A, Washington’s largest ad agency at the time, where he managed the U.S. Coast Guard advertising account. The Coast Guard’s advertising budget of $1 million annually was comparatively small, thus public service advertising was the primary method used by the Coast Guard to communicate with its stakeholders. He supervised ten PSA campaigns shot in locations from Hawaii to Alaska and was awarded a Public Service Commendation from the Coast Guard "in recognition of notable services which have assisted greatly in furthering the aims and functions of the Coast Guard." At about this time the first personal computers were being introduced and Bill developed a computerized system for evaluating the Coast Guard’s PSAs. This system ultimately formed the basis for founding his own company.

Due to his military recruiting experience, Goodwill Communications concentrated on working with various military services in the early years – starting with the U.S. Navy Recruiting Command and ultimately including work for nearly every military service except regular Army which had a substantial paid advertising budget.

For Navy, Bill completely restructured their PSA program and ultimately helped them re-position their PSAs to take advantage of media trends. Over a ten year period, the value of exposure generated for Navy was $91.2 million and for all military services we have generated $460 million in verified PSA value. For a case history of our work for Navy and the other military services click here.

Over the years, the firm added work for many other government agencies and eventually attracted some of the leading non-profits as well. In the past 27 years, the firm has distributed and evaluated more than 700 national PSA campaigns. For a list of our current clientele, click here.

Bill has made numerous contributions to the field of public service advertising beyond consulting with our clients and helping them maximize exposure for their particular causes and issues. For example:

• He developed a state-of-the-art evaluation system called PUBSANS™ (Public Service Advertising Analysis System) to bring more discipline to the evaluation process and build greater credibility for PSA reporting.
  
  
• The firm was an early technology adopter and we were the first to use the Internet for posting all our client distribution and evaluation reports, permitting greater information sharing with community partners.
  
  
• Mr. Goodwill pioneered the "shared reel" distribution service wherein multiple clients place their PSAs on a single tape or CD as a method of lowering costs. The firm’s proprietary services called CablePAK and Radio DiskPAK have generated $246.8 million in PSA exposure and over 80 national organizations have used the services.
  
  
• We created the Public Service Advertising Research Center, (PSARC) the only website dedicated exclusively to the field. When the words "public service advertising" are entered into the Google search engine, it is the first unpaid reference out of 98.7 million citations.
  
  

Bill received a master’s degree from American University’s Graduate School of Mass Communications and was an adjunct professor at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. He has spoken at numerous professional meetings and was chairman of the Partners in Public Service, the non-profit affiliate of the National Broadcast Association for Community Affairs. He helped organize and was a speaker at the first symposium held on public service advertising in Washington, DC in 1983, hosted by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications.