Kel spent her career as a senior marketing executive on the client side for companies like Bay Networks, toysmart.com & others, in virtually every sector. Then she turned 40 and decided to build the “anti-agency agency.” She would staff it with people who actually “got it” and, above all, would not do the typical agency stuff that drove Kel insane, like billable hours, pitch & switch, put junior people on major accounts, lock clients into long-term contracts, produce reports rather than results & so on.
Kel’s new agency would have, at its core, employees who not only have walked a mile in the client’s shoes, but had run a marathon in the dark & freezing rain while darting across a 6-lane highway.
Fast forward to today. Kel & Partners is playing in the epicenter of the Web 2.0 universe as a leading marketing & public relations agency for consumer & emerging technology brands. Instead of reading or ghost writing books on the subject, every single employee at Kel & Partners lives, eats, breathes & overdoses on Web 2.0. This kind of dedication gives K&P immersed insight that most rhetoric-based old school agencies will never grasp.
Under Kel’s direction, Kel & Partners has consistently delivered explosive results for brands that had low-to-zero awareness, like: Gather.com, Lemonade.com, UpDown.com, OleOle, BizUnite, Burst Media, Iconoculture, Konarka, RazorGator, SmartBargains & IdentityTruth.
Kel herself is a self-admitted Facebook addict, who blogs, Twitters, Diggs, Skypes and Flips with the best of them. She feeds off RSS, prefers Wikipedia to all other resources & writes on walls (but doesn’t poke because that wouldn’t be cool).
As someone who is allergic to details, Kel credits the K&P team for absolutely everything, from building an award-winning social media website to sweeping virtually every award for viral marketing to getting a client with no customers, no revenue & two employees on NBC’s The Today Show.
Kel is proud to say she went to less-than-notable colleges. She ended up at UMASS Dartmouth playing basketball & then went on to get an MBA from Assumption College. Based on her success in the business world, Babson College – the #1 MBA School for Entrepreneurship -- asked Kel to be a visiting lecturer in its MBA program. While at Babson, she taught Marketing for Entrepreneurs, Marketing Communications Strategy & Consumer Behavior. She still laughs over the fact that Babson would have rejected her application as a student yet found her worthy of teaching there years later. Kel views this as a reminder that parents should always have faith in their children – some just start a little later & take a different path than others.
Kel is married to Ginny Pitcher, K&P’s Co-Founder & President. She has four kids, four dogs, three cats, three tattoos (don’t ask where), & loves to run, surf, as well as do absolutely nothing.