After a Year of Rapid Growth, Elite Sem Promotes Zach Morrison to CEO; Founder Ben Kirshner Transitions to Chairman of the Board

Announcement Marks New Chapter for One of the Largest Independent Digital Marketing Agencies

Award-winning digital marketing agency, Elite SEM, announced that president Zach Morrison has been promoted to Chief Executive Officer, while founder Ben Kirshner has assumed a new role as Chairman of the Board.

The executive promotions follow a year of rapid growth –  with an over 40% organic increase in revenue in 2018 – driven by existing and new clients. Elite also introduced new services from key acquisitions, including social advertising agency OrionCKB, email marketing and creative agency Email Aptitude, and Amazon-focused ecommerce agency CPC Strategy. The change marks the beginning of a new chapter for the agency, while at the same time providing a continuity of leadership as Elite SEM seeks to build on its success in driving exponential revenue growth and ROI for leading brands and enterprise clients.

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A pioneer in the e-commerce and search marketing industry, Kirshner founded Elite in 2004, and hired Morrison as his second employee. Under their leadership, Elite has evolved from an agency focused on search engine marketing into an online marketing powerhouse with a comprehensive set of services designed to grow digital market share across the triopoly of Google, Facebook and Amazon, and collectively supported by Integrated Media Strategy and Analytics/Marketing Science teams. Today, Elite is one of the largest independent performance-based digital marketing agencies, with over $1 billion in managed ad spend.

“Zach has been vital to the success of our organization since the early days of Elite,” said Kirshner. “He’s earned the respect of our clients, vendors, employees, and our Board of Directors, and personifies our core values through his unrelenting dedication to ‘strive for greatness.’ Zach is well-prepared to lead our organization into the future, and I’m confident he will continue to drive success across our organization and on behalf of our clients.”

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As CEO, Morrison will continue to run the day-to-day operations of the company, lead the executive team that he has built over the past year, oversee the full integration of the recently acquired agencies into a unified brand, make decisions about investment opportunities, and expand his role as a thought leader in the industry at large.

Following his transition from CEO to Chairman of the Board, Kirshner will continue to develop partnerships, advise on mergers and acquisitions, and provide strategic guidance.

“The future for Elite is bright, and I’m honored to expand on Ben’s founding vision and our rock-solid foundation,” said Morrison. “From our acquisitions of ‘best of breed’ agencies and through our award-winning culture of ‘people first,’ we’ve attracted the top talent in our industry, and I’m looking forward to working with our team to execute on our growth strategy to take our agency and our clients to the next level of success.”

As President, Morrison set Elite on a steady growth trajectory by spearheading efforts to recruit a diverse team of executive leaders focused on delivering higher ROI for clients and driving market innovation. By engaging industry veterans to complement Elite’s legacy team of experts and the entrepreneurial leaders from the acquired agencies, Morrison begins his tenure as CEO uniquely positioned to lead one of the fastest-growing agencies into the future.

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