Employee Spotlight: Kerri Allen, Senior Managing Director at Applecart
Kerri Allen is a Senior Managing Director at Applecart, where she partners with CCOs and CMOs to accelerate their businesses across an increasingly complex communications landscape. With more than two decades of marcomms experience, Kerri has served in leadership roles at top agencies including Burson (WPP) and Klick Health, the world’s largest independent agency for the life sciences.
Tell us about what you did prior to joining Applecart:
I’ve worked for global agencies, independent companies, nonprofits and as a sole-proprietor. I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with leaders from some of the world's biggest companies including 3M, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola, Merck, United Airlines and many more.
Early in my career, I was a journalist and a fellow with The New York Times Institute for Journalism. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, HuffPost and many other outlets.
Why did you decide to join Applecart?
When Ford is rolling out the new automobile, it’s time to leave the horse-and-carriage business!
The communications industry is evolving at lightning speed, and I’m determined to stay on the cutting edge of where technology is taking us all. Applecart’s products and measurement solutions were tools that I immediately recognized as the missing piece for my clients’ needs and saw the industry moving in this direction.
What is your favorite Applecart use-case?
Strategic Communications, because I know first-hand how challenging (and rewarding) it can be to land a client in a major news outlet or see them hit every talking point at a crucial event. But it’s even more gratifying to have a tool that ensures that these messages are seen by the very people whom the client was trying to reach in the first place.
Our platform supercharges PR without taking away the need for high quality storytelling that the best media relations executives still deliver. Said another way, there is so much content swirling around us all, that we need the “shorthand” of a third-party imprimatur from the likes of Bloomberg or WSJ or a Davos panel, but we also need a way to get the message into stakeholders’ feeds, heads and hearts. Otherwise you’re just shouting into the digital abyss.
What should people outside of Applecart know about Applecart?
Sorry to say, but you’re probably wasting a lot of time, effort and money on the old ways of doing things. And by “old,” I mean what worked a handful of years ago may already be outdated. There was no TikTok in 2017. There was no ChatGPT in 2021. To quote Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Give us your best fun fact:
As an undergrad, I performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in a production of the Broadway musical “Hair.”
