Doug Kessler

Executive Creative Director

Doug is a displaced Yank who started his career at Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

Soap and fabric softener bored him rigid so he jumped ship to specialize in B2B.

Doug is an annoyingly ubiquitous speaker at marketing events and a prolific writer on all things marketing, content, tech, strategy and creativity.

His answer to why he’s spent so many years doing B2B (and loving it) is summarized in a quick slideshare called The Search for Meaning in B2B.

Other stuff he’s proud of include Crap, Insane Honesty, A Stakeholder Through the Heart and, mostly, this amazing place full of these smart, talented, committed and really nice people.

Doug is a copywriter at heart but with a secret jones for analytics.
And Lagavulin.

We’ve got 263 posts from Doug

How to signal authority

Trust is bound up with authority. Here are some ofthe weird ways humans signal authority to other humans.

B2B marketing / Messaging

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Why every marketing strategy should be a Learning Strategy

Every B2B marketing strategy should be a Learning Strategy. But most are actually based on a false sense of certainty. Let’s fix that.

B2B marketing / Positioning

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Ask Leela : Changing from SurveyMonkey to Momentive

How do you change the name of one of the best-known brands in tech? Very carefully, says CMO Leela Srinivasan did it for SurveyMonkey/Momentive.

B2B marketing

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Why you should kill more content

Marketers are supposed to finish the content they start, right? Maybe not. In fact, almost definitely not.

B2B marketing / Data

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Three ‘Why’ questions you need to answer fast and well

Too many B2B marketing teams fail to answer these three questions. You can fix that.

B2B marketing / Galvanizing stories

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How to write FAQs – an FAQ for B2B

We’re big believers in the power of a great FAQ section on a B2B website . Here’s an FAQ about why.

B2B marketing

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Meaning, metrics and mojo: the 3 keys to B2B marketing today

If we had to boil down the big challenges for any B2B marketer—to 3 words all starting with M—this would be that.

B2B marketing / Messaging

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How Sara Varni thinks: a chat with Twilio’s CMO

You gotta admire Twilio. They turned a pretty nichey-geeky thing (um, virtualising comms infrastructures and making them available via APIs) and turned it…

B2B marketing

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On Velocity’s Culture: airing out something that maybe we shouldn’t

A different kind of Values Statement. More an exploration of culture by exploring this one, we think rather special culture.

B2B marketing

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How Drift thinks about B2B online events: an interview with Mark Kilens

Drift is learning super-fast about running B2B online events. Here’s what Mark Kilens thinks about it all.

Customer experience

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Galvanizing story part 5: Talking the… talk.

I spoke about The Galvanizing Story at last year’s Content Marketing World. It’s kind of the Musical Video Extravaganza version of the first…

B2B marketing / Galvanizing stories

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WFH #9: The Adjective of the Pandemic

What does it say about B2B marketers that we cluster around the same phrases to express this big, hairy thing?

Messaging / Velocity Culture

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