David Abraham (executive)

David Abraham
Born	1963 (age 53–54) Lincoln, Lincolnshire
Salary	£490,000 (April 2010)
Title	Chief Executive of Channel Four Television Corporation
Term	2010–
Predecessor	Andy Duncan

David Abraham (Born August 1963) is a British media executive who is the Chief Executive of Channel 4 Television Corporation – the UK’s self-funded public service broadcaster. After an early career in advertising that led in 1997 to the foundation of the creative agency St. Luke’s, Abraham went on to senior creative roles at Discovery Communications in the UK and USA before becoming Chief Executive of UKTV in 2007.

Abraham was born in Lincolnshire. Both his parents immigrated to the UK in the 1950s – his mother from Belgium and his father from Calcutta. He moved with his parents and sister to Essex in the 1970s where he attended local state schools before going to Oxford University in 1981 to study Modern History at Magdalen College.

Abraham began his working life at the advertising agency Benton & Bowles in London in 1984 where he was a trainee account manager. He moved to the creative agency Collett Dickenson Peace (CDP) with prominent writers and art directors such as Indra Sinha and Neil Godfrey. In 1990 he was offered a position at the London office of the Californian creative agency Chiat/Day – launched by MT Rainey.

In 1995, Jay Chiat sold his agency network to Omnicom with the intention to globally merge Chiat/Day with TBWA. In the UK, client conflicts prompted an employee buy-out of the business led by Andy Law and Abraham, Who became Chief Operating Officer. The story of how St. Luke’s became an unconventional employee-owned company was told in Law’s book Open Minds, in the Harvard Business Review and in a controversial Channel 4 Cutting Edge Documentary.

Abraham became the General Manager of Discovery Networks Europe in 2001.

Abraham became General Manager of TLC in 2005, a US cable channel available in over 90m US households.

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