About Us
Elite SEM is one of a small number of online marketing firms that can boast zero employee turnover. What this means for our clients is that the account managers and executives with whom you strategize and develop objectives, will likely remain your source of contact during your association with Elite SEM.
Elite SEM can boast this very rare number because most search marketers in larger firms experience very fast burnout, boredom, or the desire to make more money consulting on their own. The Elite SEM Team is comprised of young energetic and highly enthusiastic men and women who enjoy an array of growth opportunities in a comfortable working environment. Our CEO, Ben Kirshner nurtures the abilities of his employees through educational opportunities. Elite SEM employees have an incentive to work diligently for their clients because they have a direct stake in client ROI. They benefit when their clients earn money.
Although the SEM team is young, don't be fooled. These are dedicated professionals with an edge: they are the internet community. They are the generation of social media, blogging, and Google, the internet has always been a part of their lives. All this lends to an ability to navigate and understand the constantly changing environment of online marketing and internet trending. Traditional marketers who have moved to web media are mired in a traditional methodology of marketing that does not always apply to the new school of online marketing. Elite SEM's employees learn with the technology, grow with the media, and have the ingenuity and stamina to continue to change with it, providing the best possible service to Elite SEM's clients.
Team Bio
Ben Kirshner, Founder and CEO of Elite SEM, is a serial entrepreneur and expert in creating and building high growth companies on the back of his expertise in search engine marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing and online lead generation.
Prior to founding Elite SEM, Benjamin founded CoffeeForLess.com, an online coffee retailer. CoffeeForLess is one of Internet Retailer’s Top 500 websites, and has been named to the prestigious list of Inc. 5000 Index for 2007 and 2008. Ben also co-founded Serviceleads.net, a multi-vertical online lead generation platform. ServiceLeads “Lead Gen in a Box” software provides a high quality (permission based) customer acquisition solution through its proprietary and affiliate websites.
Kirshner began his career at 24/7 Real Media as an account executive, before serving as a founding member of SendTraffic.com, a New York-based search engine marketing firm, which he was instrumental in helping grow from three to over 25 employees before the company was sold to Traffix, Inc. (NASDAQ: TRFX) in May 2004.
Ben is an Adjunct Instructor at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He is a frequent guest lecturer on Search Engine Marketing strategies at various universities, has been quoted in nationwide news publications including the Wall Street Journal, and featured in trade journals such as Automatic Merchandiser. He also serves as a consultant for The Gerson Lehrman Group, currently ranked in the top 5% of over 100,000 consultants worldwide.
Ben graduated from The George Washington University where he received dual BA degrees in Entrepreneurship and Tourism & Hospitality Management.
Ben is an active member of Entrepreneur Organization (EO) and lives with his wife Rebecca in New York City.
Lorne Landsman is Vice President of Elite SEM Inc and the first employee CEO Ben Kirshner brought on board to help grow the company. Kirshner's instincts were right, and Landsman quickly developed into one of the company’s strongest assets. He excels in his many managerial duties such as sales, client facing, daily review of all accounts, account analysis, optimization, recruitment, internship management, and training.
Landsman showed a natural aptitude for marketing while interning with an online start up firm called SendTraffic. It was there that he met Elite SEM CEO Ben Kirshner, and impressed him with his abilities. He fervently pursued his new found interest, working tirelessly to learn all he could about online marketing, and by the end of that summer SendTraffic asked him to stay on as a full time employee.
When Ben Kirshner started Elite SEM he told Landsman that he eventually wanted him to join his new company. Nine months after the founding of Elite SEM Kirshner made the call, and Landsman has been hard at work expanding Elite SEM since 2005. He has an incredible work ethic, but more than that he has a positive, energetic personality that is evident to clients and employees.
Like most of the employees at Elite SEM he is an avid sports fan, having majored in sports management at the University of Florida. Of all the hats he wears as VP, his most significant contribution is his ability to hire talented employees. He has had a direct hand in hiring nearly all of the Elite SEM team. Landsman is the kind of manager that makes employees feel as though they work with him, and not beneath him.
Zach Morrison is an Account Executive at Elite SEM. His responsibilities as an Account Executive range from initial contact and sales, to the development of pay per click campaign objectives, and the implementation of alternative internet marketing strategies.
His range of expertise is well beyond pay per click advertising. Morrison develops and maintains the email marketing campaigns, promotions, shopping comparison engine duties, and paid search for his clients.
Morrison’s dedication to his clients and to Elite SEM extends beyond the venue of pay per click. He keeps up to date with competitors, and trends for both the clients industry, and the industry of internet marketing. He can often be found staying late in the office to research, contact, and evaluate outside vendors that may offer added value to a clients business or campaign.
Morrison takes his position personally, which often takes away from a good night’s sleep, but always to the service of his clients. He is a graduate of the University Of Central Florida with a degree in Business Administration and Finance. He heard about Elite SEM from his lifelong friend Lorne Landsman. When it came time to getting an internship and all of Morrison’s friends were taking finance internships he decided to branch out and learn about online marketing. He took the summer internship at Elite SEM, and in 2005 decided to skip downtown for midtown and pursue his fascination with the developing online marketing industry.
Marc Weisinger is an Account Executive at Elite SEM, providing strategic counsel in the development of pay per click campaigns, content campaigns, and account wide management.
Weisinger is the first Account Executive at Elite SEM to manage an international pay per click ad and content campaign. As such he continuously researches the changing and developing international landscape of PPC marketing to shape, adjust, and better serve client objectives.
Talk to Weisinger for a few minutes and his passion for work and life become evident. Talk to him about the Florida Gators, and you may not get him to stop. An ardent fan of the illustrious Gators of his alma mater, the University of Florida, he will enthusiastically and accurately convey rankings, statistics, and his projected outlook for the team. He’s always more than happy to share stories from his consecutive trips to back to back to back national championships. It is this passion that drives him, a direct parallel to his work: keeping track of client statistics, rankings, and developing new strategies to optimize their futures.
While in college at the University of Florida Weisinger met Lorne Landsman who was working with Elite SEM. He had told Weisinger all about it and instantly he took an interest in online marketing. After that he took on an internship for a summer in NYC, which lead to a part time position while he completed college. Upon graduation Weisinger decided that working for a visionary such as Ben Kirshner was an opportunity worth perusing, and has been a full time Account Executive at Elite SEM since 2005.
A student of The University of Florida, Stone graduated with a degree in psychology. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and worked as Senior Program Manager for a boutique marketing company for over two years. Toward the end of her time in Atlanta, she found herself looking to larger cities for a change. Packing up her belongings and dog Oscar, she made the move to New York City, not sure if she would continue in marketing or look for another field. As luck would have it, she met an old friend from school, Elite SEM's VP Lorne Landsman, who asked her to come in for an interview. It was still marketing, but a whole new and exciting facet of the industry. From the beginning it was clear that she fit with Elite SEM's culture, and as of November 2007 became Elite SEM's first female team member. She recently celebrated her one year anniversary with the company, and looks forward to more, enjoying the fun, laid back, and still incredibly challenging, environment of Elite SEM.
Chris Chang is an Account Executive at Elite SEM, and heads the company's West Coast expansion from his San Francisco office. Chang is responsible for not only the duties of an Elite SEM Account Executive, which include all aspects of client relations and running online advertising campaigns, but he also serves as a face to face contact for our West Coast clients.
He began his career as a marketing intern at SearchRev LLC, which is the bid management platform used by Elite SEM. During his internship Chang worked with digital agencies that licensed SearchRev's bid management product. The internship developed into a full time position where Chang acted as a client-services representative.
After SearchRev was purchased by AKQA Chang was promoted from managing small agencies, to working with top tier clients. One of his biggest clients at the time was Elite SEM. In mid 2008 an opportunity arose at Elite SEM for an Account Executive with a strong background in client relations, one who was well versed in the bid management tool SearchRev, and located in California. Chang fit the profile perfectly, and has been with Elite SEM ever since.
A California native, Chang graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in marketing. He wanted to work at an interactive agency or expand a US marketing company into China. To date he has completed his mission of working for an interactive agency and expanding a company.
A University of Central Florida graduate Hayden holds a degree in finance. Initially thinking he would move directly to grad school for sports management, he was instead recruited to the team by Account Executive Zach Morrison. Hayden decided to give marketing a go, and much to his surprise found Elite SEM to be the right fit. He is able to use the skills obtained from a degree in finance in his work as an online marketer. He analyzes and interprets quantifiable data to find trends in the industries of specific clients, and the industry of search marketing as a whole.
A marketing major and active promotional marketer during his years at the University of Florida, Eisenberg thinks outside the box, and he thinks big. Before he even graduated, Eisenberg had published a school themed calendar and held the rights to an annual event, with another local media company, selling promotional sponsorships and ads to local businesses. His skill as an independent marketer and easygoing professional personality was acknowledged by Marc Weisinger, an Account Executive at Elite SEM. Weisinger matched these traits to the values and culture of Elite SEM and asked him in for an interview. Eisenberg was hired to the Elite SEM team May of 2008. His creative thinking and ability to find the most effective efficient means of accomplishing goals both large and small make him a stand out manager at Elite SEM.
Emma Fernandez is an Account Manager at Elite SEM. A graduate of The Fashion Institute of Technology she envisioned a career in textiles, or the glamorous world of fashion advertising. Required courses in general marketing stirred her interest in the field, and by the end of her first semester Fernandez was a full on fan of all aspects of marketing. She met Ben Kirshner during one of his many guest lectures at FIT, and followed up interning at Elite SEM for 3 months before being hired as a full time employee.
After high school Matt began working in the banking industry. 5 years later he reached his ceiling within the company’s business model and began to focus on learning different marketing techniques that would potentially grow the business further. Once Matt began to do research he became smitten with online marketing in particular, seeing huge potential and came to the realization that this is the future of marketing. Soon enough, Matt was more interested in focusing on the marketing side than banking and luckily for him one of his closest friends growing up, Jesse, was in the industry. He was able to get Matt an interview and hasn’t looked back since.
Martin graduated from Santa Clara University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in Finance. He was interested in pursuing a job in real estate finance during college. However, when the market took an unexpected decline, he decided to venture into less volatile, more stable fields. On the recommendation of fellow EliteSEM Senior Account Executive, Chris Chang, he enrolled in an internet marketing class to learn about this growing industry. After gaining an understanding about the rise of internet marketing and its importance for companies, he thought it would be a great opportunity to join this new field. Martin joined EliteSEM in December 2008 with an internship and has been working full-time since June 2009 out of the west coast office in San Francisco.
Derek A recent graduate from the College of Journalism and Communications as an Advertising major at the University of Florida, Rubinstein is currently a Junior Account Manager at Elite SEM. Originally recruited by a friend and now co-worker, Marc Weisinger, for a summer internship, Derek soon realized Search Engine Marketing was an extremely conducive field to his skill set and personality. After returning to school for his final semester, he focused the remainder of his coursework on SEM industry related content, while working remotely for Elite, as well.
George Rios is the Senior Software Architect for Elite SEM inc and its lead management platform. Since 2005, Rios has been the driving force behind the leads management platform. He has been involved in every aspect from front-end web-design to core component development, to infrastructure and hosting, as well as implementation of critical technical interfaces and integrations with several third-party solutions including PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Leads360 and others.
Prior to joining Elite Rios' independent software consulting practice serviced the architecture and development needs of several enterprise clients such as JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ernst & Young, PWC, KPMG, Citigroup, Wachovia, Symantec and others primarily acting as a technology leader and/or application architect for several mission critical line-of-business and consumer-facing data-driven applications. Rios has several Microsoft and Citrix certifications including MCP, MCSE, CCA, and MCSD, and was a teacher’s assistant at NJCU Computer Science Department until 1999 when he began consulting fulltime.
Ronald Yau is an Ecommerce Manager, currently managing the development, implementation, and maintenance of ecommerce websites. He holds bachelor’s degrees in both information systems and business administration from Stony Brook University. Ronald began his career as a software consultant specialized in Microsoft .NET technologies, where he participated in architecting, developing, testing, and integrating mission critical enterprise solutions. He went on to work in the financial industry as a senior software engineer. Through the years, he developed a growing interest in online marketing and social media. While expanding his knowledge and experience outside of his software development occupation, he met Ben Kirshner in one of his search engine marketing classes and joined enthusiastically join Elite SEM a year later.
Zachary is an Ecommerce Manager currently working on the development and deployment of ecommerce websites. He also serves as the SEO lead and Email manager for a wide variety of ecommerce websites.
Zachary is a seasoned online marketing professional with over 6 years of online marketing experience. He got his start on the technical side as a data base administrator before moving on to the search agency world. Since Wells Fargo, Zachary has worked at search agencies including Booyah Networks, Blue Moon Works, and Smart Search Marketing. Zachary has advanced expertise in SEO, Email Marketing, PPC Comparison Shopping, Data Management and Social Media. Clients he has worked with in the past include Skechers, Bulgari, Brookstone, Moosejaw, Auto Europe, Career Education Corp and Epicor.
He has the unique skill set of being able to effectively communicate between technical and marketing teams. If you are looking for someone to manage highly complex online marketing and development projects Zachary is your go to guy.
Zachary has degrees from New York University, The University of Colorado and most recently a Masters Degree from Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. He serves as a marketing committee leader for 2 New York City Profits. In his free time, he is always willing to go the extra mile to help have a positive impact in the community.
As a student at Syracuse University Lynch was interested in a future of freelance illustration, but quickly found himself drawn to web design and development, a lucky change of heart for Elite SEM.
His talent for the aesthetic provides a new dimension to both Elite SEM's services and the Elite SEM team.
