Bill Goodwill, CEO of Goodwill Communications,
Inc., began his career with McGraw-Hill nearly 40 years ago working
as Marketing Services Manager, after completing undergraduate studies
at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio. Prior to that,
he served three years in the U.S. Army at posts both here and in Vicenza,
Italy.
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.
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