Arnie Semsky has been self-employed as a media advisor since January 1999.

 

He previously served, for twenty years, as Executive Vice-President, Worldwide Media Director and Board Member of the BBDO Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group.  Prior to that he was VP, National TV for Grey Advertising.

 

Arnie is currently a senior advisor for ESPN and to the ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales unit, which he helped to create in 1999.  He served on the Board of Directors of 24/7 Real Media for nine years until the company was sold in 2007 to WPP for $649 million.

 

He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Interep National Radio Sales Inc. where he serves on the Audit and Compensation committees, and was a founding board member of the John A. Reisenbach Foundation for A Better and Safer New York.

 

More recently, he advised Rapt, Inc., the online inventory management company purchased by Microsoft, by providing an overview and education for their key senior executives on the implications and opportunities of the rapidly changing media marketplace.

 

For a project with Reuters Media, one of the world’s leading news and information companies, Arnie evaluated their ad sales force and selling strategies and, as a result, recruited a new head of Ad Sales.  They are currently implementing a program Arnie created called “A Blueprint for Ad Sales Success’’.

 

Arnie is on the Board of Advisors of several Internet companies and works with a select number of private clients in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  He also works on a variety of projects, including guest lectures, at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

 

Arnie has been credited with many "media firsts" such as pioneering advertising support of cable TV, placing the first commercial ever on MTV for Pepsi, orchestrating the world's first global TV buy for Gillette with News Corp., helping establish PentaCom for Chrysler, which became the model for media consolidation that combines communications planning and buying, and the creation of the BBDO Techsetter Hotline, which made BBDO the first of the major ad agencies to have an interactive website in order to gain insights about the early adopters of the medium.