There is a small piece of punctuation doing heavy labor at Yes&. The ampersand takes a pleasant word and gives it an obligation. Yes is acceptance; the mark insists on a sequel. For Zihla Salinas Arbit, chief executive of the integrated agency, that little curl has become a concise theory of work: receive what another person offers, then add something useful.
The idea comes from improvisation, where “yes, and” keeps a scene alive. In an agency it has to survive sterner settings: a client brief, a hiring decision, a spreadsheet, an acquisition. Arbit has described the principle as “accept and build,” and she has spent much of her career in jobs where building means persuading people with different skills to behave like colleagues instead of adjacent vendors.
Her résumé crosses the machinery of modern marketing. She has worked in customer relationship marketing, holding-company strategy, Los Angeles creative operations, entertainment campaigns, global brand leadership and independent-agency ownership. In June 2024, she joined Yes& as chief operating officer. Exactly a year later, the company made her CEO, with a mandate spanning new business, organic growth, acquisitions, creative development and talent.
The operating careerLearning every dialect in the room
Arbit graduated from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000 with a business degree. Her later posts placed her near both the creative product and the organizational wiring behind it. She served as CMO of RAPP, then as senior vice president for strategy and development at MDC Partners. At Doner LA she became executive vice president and managing director, helping build an office that a former colleague later recalled growing from zero to more than 50 people in two years.
In 2018 she moved into entertainment marketing as CEO of Trailer Park Group. The work carried its own brisk physics. A trailer has perhaps two minutes to give away enough and preserve enough. In an interview that year, Arbit reduced the craft to “good storytelling, compelling editorial, and leaving the viewer with the desire to continue watching.” Asked whether trends tired her, she replied with a line dry enough to keep: “No, they never last that long.”
She was also thinking about screens. Trailer Park’s research found that 77 percent of consumers watched entertainment content on phones every week. Arbit argued that trailers needed to be made for mobile viewing, with their aspect ratios, graphic text and duration adapted to each platform. The point was not novelty for its own sake. Data should shape the work, while suspense still had to do its old-fashioned job.
By 2019 she was U.S. Agency CEO and Global CMO at ENGINE. The dual title is revealing. She oversaw both the brand seen around the world and the American combination of media, strategy and creative. Under that structure, ENGINE brought previously separate capabilities into one agency offering. Her career kept returning to the same stubborn problem: clients experience one business challenge while agencies tend to organize themselves into many departments.
“What is needed in this new marketing environment is fewer siloed solutions and more full-funnel strategies.”Zihla Salinas Arbit, 2023
The founder’s turnA network called Conspiracy Theory
In 2021, Arbit, Daniel Weisiger and Brick Rucker founded Conspiracy Theory, a minority-owned and woman-led network of specialist agencies. The name was mischievous; the premise was practical. Acquire focused firms, preserve the expertise that made them worth buying, and combine them when a client needed a wider solution. Arbit designed the vision, secured financing and worked with the partner agencies on new business and a unified offering.
A 2022 podcast introduction called her a self-described “loud and disruptive personality who lets her full self shine.” That description fits the cheerful punctuation of her public posts. She celebrates colleagues in capital letters and exclamation points, and when her promotion to Yes& CEO became public, she thanked the leadership and the whole team before signing off as their “#1 fan.” Enthusiasm is easy to counterfeit in advertising. The more interesting evidence lies in where she spends it: on teams, combinations and other people’s work.
Her advisory work adds another angle. Arbit has advised agencies and private-equity firms on portfolio companies and prospective investments, and joined the advisory board of investment bank Evalla Advisors. She has also served the Marcus Graham Project, which works to widen access and representation in advertising, and supports Girls Leadership. In 2025 she served as a final-round Effie judge, praising the awards for recognizing work that produces results beyond the presentation deck.
One career, repeatedly widened
The ampersand at workAcquiring capability without collecting clutter
Arbit arrived at Yes& during a deliberate expansion. In the year before her promotion, the agency added Beacon Digital Marketing, the Washington institution Williams Whittle, Atlanta creative shop Hothouse and crisis-communications specialist CommCore. Each filled a different square: B2B performance, nonprofit experience, consumer creative, executive training. Her task was to make the squares touch.
The pace continued after she took the top job. Yes& acquired Chicago B2B and technology firm Symmetri in January 2026, then Atlanta design studio Metaleap Creative. In May it joined Dawn, a network of independent agencies that offers shared data, analytics, creative and media reach. Modo Modo followed in June, deepening Yes&’s B2B work in sectors where the product is complex and the buying committee is rarely small.
Recent additions, mapped by primary contribution
Acquisition news is usually written in the language of extra: more scale, more services, more geography. Arbit’s public emphasis is on fit. In a 2025 podcast conversation, she discussed “figure-out-ability,” curiosity and positivity as measurable values rather than lobby decoration. She also argued that strong account service matters as much as the idea. This is sensible in a practical, unshowy way. A brilliant concept cannot rescue a partnership that makes every email feel like an international incident.
The Yes& philosophy also draws a line between partnership and people-pleasing. An improviser accepts the reality of a scene but still contributes. An agency can respect a client’s premise while questioning the brief, extending the thought or spotting the missing audience. The “and” carries the professional duty to add judgment.
Another kind of arenaThe horse knows whether you communicated
Away from agencies, Arbit is a registered adult-amateur dressage competitor. The sport is exacting and publicly scored. Horse and rider execute a prescribed sequence while judges assess rhythm, suppleness, contact, impulsion, straightness and collection. The finished ride can look effortless, which is dressage’s elegant deception. Much of the work is nearly invisible.
Arbit’s results show patient progression. In 2022 she and Leonis scored 72.945 to win the RAAC Elite First Level Test 3, and they received the California Dressage Society’s Training Level Amateur Perpetual Trophy for that year. By the 2024 regional championships she was riding Hero at Fourth Level, where the tests demand more collection, lateral work and flying changes. In 2025 she appeared on the committee for Dressage at Flintridge. This is participation rather than a decorative hobby line.
The temptation is to turn the horse into a management parable and make it perform tricks. Better to notice the modest resemblance. Dressage rewards clear signals and punishes tension. Integration work asks for the same awareness of timing. Apply too much pressure and the organization stiffens. Give no direction and everybody invents a separate destination.
The public story is expansion. The quieter craft is coordination: knowing what to ask for, when to ask, and how lightly to hold the reins.
What comes nextMake the addition worth making
Arbit now leads a company older than many of the channels it sells. Yes& traces its history to 1986, while its current form spans government, associations, education, nonprofits, consumer brands and B2B companies. Age gives an agency references; it does not grant relevance. That must be renewed in the work and in the way newly joined teams behave after the welcome announcement fades.
Her stated ambition is straightforward: keep building partnerships, capabilities and client relationships. The distinction will come from whether those additions create a clearer company. Arbit’s record suggests she sees growth as composition, not merely collection. Specialists retain their value, the larger group supplies reach, and the client gets fewer seams to manage.
“Ever since I heard the name Yes& I knew there was something special about this company,” she said when becoming CEO. Names in advertising are promises with expense accounts. This one offers a useful daily test. Yes acknowledges the people, knowledge and constraints already present. The ampersand asks whether the next move improves them. Arbit’s job is to keep answering both halves.