Alan Kelly

Alan Kelly is a visionary business strategist, political commentator, and award-winning Silicon Valley public relations agency CEO.  In 2006, Kelly founded The Playmaker’s Standard, LLC, a Washington D.C. area management consulting and software services firm specializing in communication and competitive strategy.  He approaches his work with a simple but provocative charter - that the moves and counter-moves of business, politics, and pop culture can be mapped and managed for competitive advantage.

His development of a breakthrough “periodic table” of strategy is testament to Kelly’s vision for a comprehensive standard in the industries of influence - management, strategy, marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, public affairs, and even law.  It is a system that names, describes and prescribes the work of playmakers everywhere, and which is exhaustively catalogued in his landmark book, The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, and Buzz.

Kelly is an Adjunct Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California where he teaches a frontier graduate course entitled, Strategies of Influence.  He is also co-creator and co-host of Plays for the Presidency on XM satellite radio, P.O.T.U.S. channel 130, and of the Plays for the Presidency blog, on his website.

Kelly has made his mark on the business landscape, notably through his formation and leadership of Applied Communications Group, a public relations and research firm that earned distinction for its unique philosophy of competitive communications and quantitative grounding. From its founding in 1992 to the sale of its assets in 2003, the firm garnered numerous best-in-class recognitions for its work with Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Genentech, VeriSign, Veritas Software, BEA Systems, TechNet and Informatica, among others.

Kelly, 50, holds a Master’s Degree in Communication Research from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Relations from the University of Southern California.  He is a member of the Arthur W. Page Society.  Kelly lives with his wife and two children in Maryland and enjoys racing his Etchells sailboat, Playmaker.