Neil Cohen has been creating, building and managing brands for established global companies like Sega, Hilton, Arby’s and McDonalds, and for entrepreneurial companies like adauction and campsix, for more than 25 years. For the past seven years, Neil has been the principal of Cohen & Company, a San Francisco-based brand/marketing strategy consulting firm that has done work for Yahoo!, Blue Shield, Pyramid Brewing, Friendster San Francisco State University, SFO and more than 50 startups.

He was a founder and Chief Marketing Officer for campsix, an e-business incubator internationally recognized for the creation and acceleration of new business concepts into sustainable and scalable businesses. At campsix he created the brand strategies and communications programs that successfully launched three e-business ventures in nine months.

Before campsix, Neil served as Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for OneMediaPlace (formerly adauction), the first ever advertising exchange for buying and selling media and one of the first five online b2b exchanges in the world. There he led the marketing, sales, business development and product development teams and grew monthly sales to $2 million per month — an increase of nearly 20X — in under a year. Prior to OneMediaPlace,

Neil was Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Zircon Corporation, the leading, developer and manufacturer of electronic hand tools, where he doubled the company's top-line sales in less than two years.

Neil was also Vice President of Marketing & Communications for SEGA of America. In 1995 he orchestrated the advertising and media campaign that lead the company to first place in industry market share against Nintendo and Sony, the last time the company has ever achieved that position.

Neil has also held Vice President level positions at Arby's, where he helped lead the turnaround of the then stagnant Arby’s chain, and at Hilton Hotels, where he was part of the team that relaunched the Hilton Brand. Prior to being on the client side, Neil was a founding partner of Douglas Consulting Group (now a division of Cohn & Wolf), a marketing communications firm representing Hilton, Wesson Oil and Taco Bell, among others.

Prior to founding Douglas consulting group, he was partner and Executive Vice President at Gelman & Gray Communications, a Los Angeles-based public relations consulting firm, representing McDonald’s, Ralphs Grocery Company, Chief Auto Parts, Lawry’s and McKesson Water Products Company (Sparklets/Alhambra).

From 1990 - 94 Neil taught at the University of Southern California School of Journalism and still frequently lectures at major university business schools including San Francisco State University. He has been a guest speaker at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He wrote a weekly marketing column for ClickZ, an online publication from 2000 - 2001.

Neil received a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Florida, Gainesville, and a Master of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.