Honoring a Pioneer: Celebrating Alan Kelly’s Life and Career

The world of business and political communications lost a true pioneer last week. And many of us lost a valuable mentor and friend.

Alan Kelly taught the public relations industry and related fields to invoke, jam, crowd, bait and peacock. No, they’re not dance moves or plays run on a football field. They’re strategic “plays” that are used (consciously or not) to influence the actions or beliefs of audiences – and they are “run” every day by Fortune 500 CEOs, politicians, lawyers, startup founders, public relations leaders, and even pop stars.

For some, the use of communications techniques to drive competitive advantage is second nature. For others, they are learned skills that can be used to advocate for ideas, people and organizations in a fast-paced, competitive communications environment. Alan devoted his career to cultivating the practice of competitive influence – and then studying and classifying the craft behind it, across various “influence” disciplines – so others could learn the moves and counter-moves to successfully understand and navigate their environments. 

Many of us met Alan in the early 1990s, as he started and grew a communications firm in Silicon Valley named Applied Communications. Kelly was among a group of early Silicon Valley marketing and communications pioneers who helped grow the technology industry, advocating for new innovations and helping companies use communications to drive demand, build brands, create categories and define new markets. Kelly didn’t think of communications as just words and ideas shared in verbal or written form. Rather, he approached it as an elemental science where every action spurs a reaction among players in a marketplace—often resulting in very real business or organizational outcomes. Kelly was passionate that these weapons belonged squarely in the CXO arsenal. He made it his life’s work. 

Applied Communications – or “Applied” as most of us called it – was a proving ground for Kelly's unique approach to communications. The firm became a powerhouse in the technology PR world, growing to 120 people with offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam at the height of the dot-com boom (though most clients were enterprise software, hardware and networking companies, not dot-com startups). Applied was in the right place at the right time, with the right clients (Oracle, HP, Cisco, Genentech, PayPal, Veritas, Informatica and others) to test and hone the competitive taxonomy. Alan was also a master talent scout, recruiting waves of people with different backgrounds to manage the super-charged tech battles of the time.

Kelly ingrained “competitive communications” in all of us, and we developed and practiced it religiously via every action, every news release, every media pitch, every analyst briefing, and every client interaction. Not everyone agreed with the competitive approach, which often made Alan a controversial figure. While others may shy away from that debate, Alan relished it. He believed that we were paid advocates, and we should be honest about that role – and while building “mutually beneficial” relationships may be valuable, our ultimate goal was to help our clients win in the marketplace. Not by doing anything unethical or inappropriate, but by using the various tools available to any and all of us to advocate for our agendas within an inherently competitive environment.

For years, Alan talked about defining a system to classify the elements of competitive influence – codifying the plays that we ran and he observed in the market – similar to the Periodic Table of Elements that inform chemistry, physics and other sciences. After selling Applied to the Next Fifteen group in 2003, Kelly made good on that ambition – moving his family to the Washington D.C. area and writing a book The Elements of Influence that defined and documented the plays he studied. He then created a specialized consultancy – Playmaker Systems – to advise clients on how to use the system, including a set of tools, techniques and training to decode, predict and control the plays and players with a given market. Through Playmaker Systems, Alan expanded his playing field into academia, politics, law and other fields, including a weekly SiriusXM radio series on “Plays for the Presidency.” 

All told, Alan played a central role in elevating public relations and communications into a business-critical function. His system is now taught at leading universities and is applied by thousands of advocates across industries. 

Beyond all of his accomplishments, Alan was a devoted family man, and our hearts go out to his wife Kim, his children Katie and Leo, and all who loved him. He was also an avid sailor on both coasts, and he continued to crew for other boats after recently selling his own. Alan was also a larger-than-life presence in everything he did, with a flair for the dramatic, and he played a major role in the development of many careers. For those of us who worked with him at Applied, it was a special place to “grow up” in the industry – and we know he was very proud watching all of us go on to do great things in our careers and personal lives.

Thank you, Alan, for the time you shared with us. We promise to carry on your legacy. You set the standard for us, so let the playmaking continue.

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Written with gratitude by Applied Alumni Tim Marklein, Burghardt Tenderich, Shannon Mollner O'Neill and Christine Kerst