Chief Operating Officer & Chief Creative Officer

James Dowd

James Dowd is the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Creative Officer of Rebellion Group, a leading brand marketing and Behavioral Intelligence Agency based in Connecticut, where James has become one of the state’s more distinctive creative and agency leaders, helping Rebellion bring together behavioral intelligence, brand strategy, creative direction, AI, and operational execution.

As both CCO and COO of Rebellion Group, he lives in the tension between chaos and control, applying the imagination that has launched major, award-winning national 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.

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.

In his speaking and lecture appearances, James explores how organizations can better understand people, create meaning, and make more wonderful decisions in a world increasingly shaped by AI and automation. His thinking focuses on behavioral intelligence, psycholinguistics, creative strategy, imagination & conceptual thinking, agency leadership, and the operational systems required to turn ideas into outcomes.

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