Kevin wins AMA OKC’s 2026 Marketer of the Year Award!

Kevin would not have written this post. He would have sent a short note to the client whose work got him noticed, thanked the team, and gone back to building a questionnaire. So we’re writing it for him.

Last month, Kevin Jessop, Evolve’s founder and CEO, was named Marketer of the Year by the Oklahoma City chapter of the American Marketing Association. For a firm built around getting other people to tell their stories, it felt strange and wonderful to watch the room turn and look at ours.

The award recognizes a career that started in 2005. Twenty-one years later, Evolve has four directors, a 20-year AMA OKC membership, and client work that runs both state-wide and internationally. Most of that story is on our website. The part that isn’t, the part about who Kevin actually is to work with, is below.

What follows is the introduction read aloud at the awards ceremony. We’ve left it as written, because it was written to be heard.

If you’ve worked with an agency in Oklahoma City over the past two decades, there’s a decent chance Kevin Jessop has been behind the scenes, asking the questions nobody else thought to ask.

Kevin is the founder and CEO of Evolve Research, the Oklahoma City marketing research firm he started in 2005 after cutting his teeth at several research agencies in London and Oklahoma. He’ll tell you “CEO” is on the business card, but “Director of Research Strategy” is the job. He works with every client to figure out what research they need, how to do it, when it has to be done, and how it ties back to the business objective. Then he takes the data and turns it into something a marketer can act on Monday morning. In his own words, he’s a translator of lots of information.

Kevin has spent nearly 30 years in public opinion research, message testing, UX, and behavioral insights. His work has spanned utilities, fintech, healthcare, public health, oil and gas, tourism, transit, education, nonprofits and more, for clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to small businesses and mission-driven organizations across Oklahoma and nationwide. In the last few years alone, Evolve has worked with local organizations such as OU Health, the Oklahoma State Department of Health, TSET, OERB, Visit OKC, the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office, Hunger Free Oklahoma, and several tribal nations. One agency CEO put it this way: Evolve was “the first true research firm of its kind in this market.”

Under Kevin’s leadership, Evolve built its own survey analysis platform, put AI tools to work across research design and analysis, and replaced the static report deck with interactive reporting clients can read, navigate, and use. Every study is designed from scratch. No questions come off a shelf. And if you’ve seen an Evolve proposal, you know the firm’s mascot is an English bloodhound. That is not a coincidence. Kevin is a native of the UK, holds a degree from Brunel University in England, and has built a company around the idea that curiosity keeps your nose down and your ears open.

Kevin has been a member of the AMA Oklahoma City chapter for 20 years and is a past president. Three members of his four-person leadership team are past AMA OKC presidents, which tells you how he thinks about this community. He’s also a member of the Insights Association and Tribe.

Ask the people who work with him and you’ll hear the same things. Kevin is the quiet one in the room. He listens more than he talks, thinks before he answers, and has the patience to let a good idea develop instead of forcing it. He’s fearless when it counts: starting a research firm from scratch, in a market that didn’t have one, and that he was brand new in (literally “from across the pond”) took nerve, and so does rebuilding how your company reports its work twenty years in. But what his team will tell you first is that he’s kind. He is supportive without being soft, endlessly creative, and he has built a place where talented people stay for a decade or more because it’s not only fun to work there, but they believe in the mission and the impact of their work. That is a rarer accomplishment than any award.

He is also deeply humble. Kevin does not brag about his work, and he would never have put himself forward for a night like this. Everything you just heard, someone else had to say for him. Which is exactly why it needed to be said out loud, in this room.

When he’s not working, you’ll find him behind a camera, in front of a grill, or creating music, sometimes all three at once. He has a well-documented love of Indian food, and his favorite work meetings are the ones that happen over lunch and drinks on a Plaza District patio with his team. He’s a family man with a serious weakness for Basset Hounds, and he loves his fiancée, Jen.

Please help congratulate your 2026 Marketer of the Year, Kevin Jessop.