Chief Operations Officer & Chief Creative Officer

James Dowd

James doesn’t do safe. As both Chief Creative Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Rebellion Group, he lives in the tension between chaos and control — applying the imagination that has launched major campaigns for brands like Budweiser, Kellogg’s, and Capital One, while engineering the operations that make those ideas real and impactful for any brand in any industry. He embodies contradiction on purpose. One hand sketches visions, the other hand engineers systems. One eye is on the wild frontier of imagination, the other on the hard metrics of delivery. It’s a strange balance, but it works — because James is less interested in fitting into a box than building one big enough to hold the rebellion.

His path has cut through film and television for networks like MTV, HBO, and Fox Sports, into the boardrooms of Fortune 500s as a creative consultant, and out into the scrappy marketing wilds of startups, cannabis, crypto, CPG, and beyond. He wrote the book Write Dumb, lectures at universities, reluctantly speaks at events and on podcasts, and still finds time to push brands to rebel against the ordinary.

Someone once wrote, “Be daring, be different, be impractical…” — James took it literally, and built a career on it.

Play-it-safers beware.