Jennifer Reel arrived at First National Bank in 2000 as a temporary employee. The bank then held less than $4 billion in assets and operated almost 30 branches. It was a long-established Pennsylvania institution, but not yet the multistate operation she would eventually help explain to the world. Reel had already worked in a very different kind of institution: Pennsylvania schools, where she taught reading and math. The job changed. The underlying discipline did not. Both ask a person to take something that can feel difficult, distant or technical and make it understandable enough to use.
Twenty-five years later, Reel is Executive Vice President and Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at F.N.B. Corporation and First National Bank. The title covers internal and external communications, brand management, reputation, marketing services and strategy. It also describes a rare kind of corporate apprenticeship. Reel did not drop into FNB after collecting a sequence of prestigious logos. She learned the place in layers, moving through advertising, creative services, brand strategy and corporate communications while the company expanded around her.
The numbers set the scale. By the time of her 2025 promotion, FNB reported $49 billion in assets and approximately 350 banking offices across seven states and Washington, D.C. Its footprint reached metropolitan markets from Pittsburgh and Cleveland to Baltimore, Washington, Charlotte and Charleston. A company that once fit inside a relatively tight regional story had become a network of communities, products, regulators, investors and employees. Growth created reach. It also created a harder communications problem: how does one institution sound coherent to people experiencing it from hundreds of different places?
Chapter oneThe patient climb
Reel's path through FNB was gradual in the useful sense of the word. She managed advertising and creative services, then moved into brand and communication strategy. By 2013, she was Senior Vice President and Director of Corporate Communications. Each step widened her field of view. Advertising teaches attention. Brand work forces choices about consistency. Corporate communications adds the pressure of timing, evidence and audiences who do not all want the same thing.
In May 2022, FNB named Reel its inaugural Chief Communications Officer. The role reported directly to Chairman, President and CEO Vincent J. Delie Jr. Its brief was unusually broad: executive, crisis, employee and customer communications; media and public relations; reputation; thought leadership; and counsel to leaders throughout the company. The promotion acknowledged a reality that the previous few years had made difficult for any large employer to ignore. Communication was no longer a support function summoned near the end of a decision. It was part of how a decision worked.
That elevation also put a formal title on knowledge Reel had been accumulating for more than two decades. Organizational memory can easily become nostalgia. In an operator's hands, it becomes pattern recognition. The veteran remembers which promise accompanied an earlier expansion, how employees reacted to the last major shift and which bits of corporate language create fog rather than confidence. Longevity matters only when the memory can be converted into better judgment. Reel's progression suggests that FNB found practical value in hers.
Chapter twoA small team and a wide map
The communications team Reel led was reported at ten people, serving a company of approximately 4,200 employees without substantial agency support. Its work ranged from campaigns and press releases to employee events. That is a revealing ratio. A small group cannot win by treating every request as equally urgent or every channel as a separate universe. It needs repeatable systems, clear owners and leaders elsewhere in the company who can carry a message without sanding off its meaning.
A major office move offered a practical test. Roughly 800 employees were preparing to transition into FNB's new financial center. A building project is concrete to the people approving plans and abstract to the people wondering where they will sit, how they will commute and what will change on Monday morning. Reel launched an intranet destination called The Vault. It combined a countdown clock, photographs and a question-and-answer section. Lunch-and-learns gave the transition a live forum. An ambassador program, Change Champions, put informed colleagues closer to the people experiencing the move.
The cleverness was not in any one tool. It was in the combination. The countdown made time visible. The gallery made the destination visible. The Q&A gave uncertainty somewhere to go. The ambassadors made help human. Anyone managing change can borrow the architecture: build one dependable source, show progress, answer ordinary questions without judgment and create a network of people who can listen in both directions.
One institution, five listening posts
The job is less about broadcasting one line than keeping different audiences connected to the same underlying facts.
The same systems thinking appeared outside the company. From 2018, FNB's media coverage increased by roughly 75 percent. In one reported year, targeted releases, media tours and a deliberate awards strategy helped the bank secure more than 60 recognitions from national publications. Visibility was not treated as a single splash. It was assembled from repeatable proof points. For a bank, that distinction matters. Attention without credibility is noise; third-party recognition, access and consistent evidence can reinforce one another.
Chapter threeThe archivist in the marketing office
For FNB's 160th anniversary in 2024, Reel took on the role of archivist. It is an unexpectedly apt image for a modern communications executive. A legacy brand carries stored trust, but it also carries habits and old language. Before it can move forward without becoming generic, someone has to know which pieces of history still explain the place.
Reel led a campaign designed to engage employees and customers with that history. At the same time, FNB was promoting a digital model built around online, mobile and branch experiences. In an article under her own name, she described the institution's longevity as a balance between innovation and service-oriented values. The tension is familiar to any established company. Celebrate the past too heavily and the brand begins to feel like a museum. Chase novelty too aggressively and the company discards the meaning people already attach to it.
Her 2025 promotion joined communications and marketing under one remit. On an organization chart, that can look like consolidation. In practice, it brings two halves of a promise closer together. Marketing attracts attention and shapes expectations. Communications handles explanation, scrutiny and memory. When they disagree, customers feel the seam. When they work from the same facts, each makes the other more credible.
A career built in layers
Chapter fourCredentials, committees and the craft beneath the title
The career has an unusually consistent educational spine. Reel earned both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. She later graduated with honors from the American Bankers Association School of Bank Marketing and Management and earned the Certified Financial Marketing Professional designation. She also served on an ABA editorial advisory committee and a Pennsylvania Bankers Association public relations committee, and has been a member of the Public Relations Society of America.
Those affiliations are not decorative details. Banking communications sits inside a dense web of obligations. A good message must often be accurate enough for lawyers, useful enough for customers, direct enough for employees and plain enough for anyone to understand. Professional committees create a place to compare that craft across institutions. The certification work supplies a common language for measuring it.
Recognition followed the operating results. Reel was named to Ragan's 2025 class of Top Women in Communications in the Dynamic Do-ers category and was included among the Top 50 Women Leaders in Communications by Women We Admire. Her public profile has remained centered on the work rather than on a cultivated executive persona. Even the most colorful details are tools: a vault for questions, champions for change, an archivist's attention to the past.
Final ledgerThe compounding value of context
Reel's story pushes against one of the loudest assumptions in modern executive life: that reinvention requires departure. Her career contains plenty of reinvention, but most of it happened inside one institution. The teacher became an advertising manager. The advertising manager moved into brand. The brand operator became a corporate communicator. The communicator entered the executive ranks and then took responsibility for marketing as well.
There is no universal lesson here about tenure. Staying can create blind spots just as easily as wisdom. The distinction is whether a person keeps enlarging the problem they can solve. Reel's scope expanded as FNB did. She acquired formal training, participated in industry groups, built new channels and learned how different audiences experience the same company. The institution became more complicated; her role became more integrative.
The former reading and math specialist now works with a different curriculum: strategy, reputation, change and trust. Yet the task remains recognizable. Find the part people cannot yet see. Give it structure. Replace institutional fog with language, pictures, dates and someone willing to answer a question. Then repeat, because understanding is rarely created by a single announcement.
At FNB, twenty-five years turned a temporary assignment into a vantage point. Reel has seen the bank with fewer than 30 branches and with roughly 350. She has communicated through expansion, digital investment, an anniversary and a major workplace transition. Her advantage is not merely that she remembers the earlier version. It is that she can help the current version recognize itself.