Welcome!

Update: Rock The Boat Marketing ceased operation in December 2015, when I joined Calamos Investments. I worked at Calamos through December 2022, leaving as Head of Digital Marketing. Since January 2023, I've been Executive Vice President of LG Digital, a business unit of Lowe Group. There's still nothing I like better than rocking the boat—contact me there!

My name is Pat Allen, and my financial services marketing and communications experience includes several years in senior marketing and communications positions with Chicago’s great investment management companies (Claymore Securities as Director of Marketing, Calamos Investments as Director of Web Channel Development, Morgan Stanley/Van Kampen Investments as Director of Marketing Communications and Scudder Funds/Kemper Funds as Director of Electronic Communications).

My content work is also informed by my several years in senior editorial and publishing roles for retail banking’s leading professional services organizations (BAI as Director of the Publishing channel and the U.S. League of Savings Institutions as Senior Editor). My overall consulting work with investment managers and associations dates back to 2001.

Since 1996, when I led a wee team in the development of the intermediary industry’s first Website (Kemper.com), my passion has been directed toward the speed-to-market communications advantage and measurability of digital media. And, even though my real job today is consulting, I still manage a few sites...and yes, have registered more domains than I'll ever develop.

In the third quarter of 2009, I founded AdvisorTweets, LLC, whose curated Web site AdvisorTweets.com aggregates the Twitter updates of U.S.-based financial advisors and blog regularly commented on financial advisors' use of social media. By July 2011, an increasing number of broker-dealers and financial advisors were finding their way to Twitter and I decided that I had taken the site as far as I could. I sold the site in July 2011 to Smarsh.

If you’re involved in financial services and you think that it’s time to consider the possibilities of working with Pat Allen and Rock The Boat Marketing's network of hard-working professionals, let's talk.

My goal is for the Rock The Boat Marketing site to be the resource I would have wanted when I was “on the inside” as an asset management marketer. Count on the blog and my social network participation for a mix of reporting, observation and, ideally, information exchange on issues involving financial services companies and their embrace and mastery of digital media. I know that there are limits on regulated firms' employees' ability to participate but if you can, I hope you will!