Webinar Overview

On February 13, PRIMEChat welcomes the outspoken Alan Kelly, CEO of Playmaker Systems.  You may recognize Alan as the consistently thoughtful and reliably provocative professional communicator who challenges many of PR’s basic assumptions:  Is the mission of public relations to win or to find symmetry? Is PR designed ultimately to achieve a business outcome or to represent an organization’s stakeholders? Alan’s counterintuitive thinking and iconoclastic approach always make for compelling content.Entrepreneur, author, agency founder and professor, Alan launched Playmaker Systems in 2006 to create a broad-based decision-making system for communicators as well as other disciplines. With its patented decision systems and applications, Playmaker helps professionals analyze and anticipate the moves of their marketplaces for increased command-and-control and faster time-to-influence.

Speakers

Alan KellyCEOPlaymaker Systems

Alan Kelly is a visionary strategist, author, professor, political analyst, and award-winning Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He is Founder and Chief Executive of Playmaker Systems, LLC, a strategy and simulations firm.  Based in the Washington D.C. area, the company’s services are based on a breakthrough decision system for communications, social media, marketing, sales and military intelligence professionals. Its clients include Abbott, AbbVie, Bayer, Dell, GSK, HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Pandora Media, Royal Dutch Shell, SAP, the U.S. Department of Defense, and VMware.Kelly’s work is driven by a simple idea:  That influence – like chemistry, biology, language and even music – is underlain by a single system of irreducibly unique elements. In this regard, he envisions a modern lingua franca for managers of reputations, brands and other intangible assets, applicable across industries, governments and cultures.Kelly’s development of a periodic table of influence in 2004 is testament to his vision for a comprehensive standard in the industries of influence – notably management, strategy, marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, public affairs, and information warfare. It is a system that names, describes and prescribes the work of influence strategists (i.e., playmakers) everywhere, catalogued in his landmark book, The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, and Buzz (Penguin Books 2006).  Kelly holds a U.S. patent for this work and has published numerous opinion-editorials and peer review papers, including the 2013 publication of Dancing with the Giant, a challenge to communications scholars and practitioners, published in the International Journal of Communication.Since 2008, Kelly has been a regular contributor to Sirius XM satellite radio, P.O.T.U.S. 124, in the weekly segments Plays of the Week and Plays for the Presidency.  He is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post and Politix.  From 2011 to 2014, Kelly served as an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at the The George Washington University, teaching a frontier graduate course entitled, Political Strategy and Simulation.  In 2008, at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, he helped pioneer virtual teaching by way of his first graduate course, Strategies of Influence.In technology and marketing, Kelly is known for his founding and leadership of Applied Communications Group, a San Francisco-based public relations and research firm that earned distinction for its quantitative grounding and unique philosophy of competitive communications. From its formation 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, SeeBeyond, Genentech, VeriSign, PayPal, Veritas Software, BEA Systems, TechNet and Informatica, among others.Kelly, 58, 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 lives with his wife and two children in Maryland and enjoys racing his Etchells one-design sailboat, Playmaker.Email Alan Kelly, call 301-654-6500 or follow him on Twitter @playmakeralan. 

Mark WeinerChief Executive OfficerPRIME Research Americas

One of the world’s largest corporate communications research and consulting firms, PRIME employs more than 500 analysts and consultants who combine talent with technology to foster better business decisions among its global clients. Weiner joined PRIME as CEO in 2008. Prior to PRIME, Weiner was the Global Director and Senior Vice President of Ketchum Research where he led an international team of analysts before which he was the CEO of Delahaye, a corporate communications research and consulting firm. Weiner founded Medialink Research in 1994 which became Delahaye Medialink in 1999 after the acquisition of The Delahaye Group. Weiner is a member of the PR News Measurement Hall of Fame and delivered the Distinguished Lecture in Public Relations at Quinnipiac University.Weiner is a member of the Arthur W. Page Society, serves as a Trustee and the 2017 Chairman of the Measurement Commission for The Institute for Public Relations, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Museum of Public Relations. He is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, the Public Relations Society of America and AMEC. Weiner sits on the editorial advisory boards of The Strategist and PR News. He is a regular contributor to PR Week, IABC’s Communication World, PRSA’s Tactics and The Strategist, and Commpro.biz/PR-ROI, as well as an active participant at conferences by The Institute for Public Relations, The Conference Board, ABERJE, the Association of National Advertisers, The American Marketing Association, The Arthur Page Society, IABC and PRSA. Since 1993, he has devoted his career to helping many of the world’s most respected organizations and brands to demonstrate and generate a positive return on their investment in corporate and brand communications.