Kelly started her career at Cars.com and AOL back when people still said, “You’ve Got Mail!” without irony. In 2003, she launched her first digital marketing agency and later sold it in 2014. A vacation to the Kona Coast in Hawaii gave her the idea (and the name) for her consulting company, Kona Company, a digital strategy firm that helps clients untangle marketing and technology problems while hopefully avoiding too many buzzwords.

Kelly has been teaching at Northwestern for almost 10 years across Medill, Kellogg, McCormick, and SPS. Before that, she served as an Adjunct Professor for a decade at DePaul University in Chicago. Her courses cover digital marketing, visual communication, and the ever-shifting future of marketing. Whether in the classroom, on Zoom, or on a conference stage, she’s happiest when she’s absorbed in conversations about marketing with students and professionals.

Outside the classroom, Kelly keeps one foot in the industry by consulting with B2B tech and software companies in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. At Medill’s Spiegel Research Center, she spends her time researching generative AI and emerging technology (and trying to convince people that robots are more helpful than scary…most of the time). She also wrote her first book, Search Marketing: A Strategic Approach to SEO and SEM, which is available on Amazon.

When she’s not optimizing websites, she’s usually traveling with her family, dabbling in yoga, or finding ways to turn everyday life – from coffee runs to airline delays – into a marketing lesson.