Profile / Brand & Marketing
She trained for a trading desk, took one advertising class, and ended up building the brand voice of a Wall Street giant - ring that says "Dream" still on her right hand.
Jess Schnurr was supposed to end up on a trading desk. She went to Susquehanna University to study finance, added a Spanish minor, and spent the summers after her freshman and sophomore years interning on Wall Street trading floors. The path was drawn. Then, junior year, she signed up for an advertising class, and the drawing changed.
"I like to dream BIG," she says, and the sentence reads like a resume when you follow where the dream went. That advertising class led to a summer internship at FCB in San Francisco, which led to agency jobs, which led, eventually, to a corner of Morgan Stanley most people never think about. Today she is a Managing Director and the firm's Global Head of Brand Marketing. She runs branding, media, advertising, sponsorships and events for a company with roughly 80,000 employees and a name people usually connect to spreadsheets rather than storytelling.
That gap - between what people expect from a bank and what a brand can actually make them feel - is the whole job. And Schnurr, it turns out, was trained for both sides of it. She can read a balance sheet. She would rather write an anthem.
Plenty of people take a class that surprises them. Fewer let it rewrite the plan. Schnurr had every reason not to. She had the finance major, the trading-desk internships, the momentum. The advertising class did not offer more security. It offered a better fit.
Part of the pull was older than college. She started ballet at age three, and dance and music gave her an early, physical sense that she needed a creative outlet to feel like herself. Psychology classes later added the other half of the equation - a lasting curiosity about, in her words, "the way people tick, learn and grow." Marketing sits exactly where those two interests meet: it is creative expression aimed at human behavior. Looking back, the pivot reads less like a detour and more like a homecoming.
Her first real proof that the switch would pay off arrived in 2006. At The Kaplan Thaler Group she worked on Procter & Gamble's "Dawn Saves a Duck," the campaign that showed the dish soap gently cleaning oil off a rescued duckling. It was warm, it was simple, and it stuck. The spot still runs. Two decades on, that is the standard she measures against - not the noise a campaign makes in launch week, but whether anyone remembers it later.
When Schnurr and her team set out to define how Morgan Stanley should sound to the world, they landed on a phrase that holds two ideas in tension: "Old School Grit. New World Ideas." The old-school grit belongs to the experienced doer who has been through cycles. The new-world ideas belong to the innovator who refuses to run the old playbook. The line argues that the two are not opposites, and that the firm is at its best when it carries both at once.
The 2023 launch did not look or sound like typical financial-services advertising. The team worked with the directing duo Salsa and photographer Pep Avila, and they brought in Janelle Monae, whose voice carries the anthem spot. Monae was cast for a reason that fits the whole message - an artist known for charting her own path rather than following someone else's. The platform proved durable enough to extend, spawning follow-up work including "From Grit to Vision."
Schnurr is candid that her creative strength has a shadow. Ambition, she says, "ultimately makes the work better and brings energy to our process." It also makes focus and feasibility harder, and she admits she multitasks more than she should. Rather than pretend the trait away, she manages it - big dreams pointed at a small number of targets, with people around her who keep the work grounded. It is a more honest account of leadership than most executives offer.
A large part of Schnurr's remit is sponsorship, and the clearest example is Morgan Stanley's marquee involvement in The Players Championship. The firm's presence there runs on a simple belief that useful relationships get built through shared purpose, not logos. The programming brings golf figures and firm leaders into rooms designed for conversation instead of transactions.
The piece she points to most is Eagles for Impact, run with the youth organization First Tee. Every eagle scored during the tournament turns into a donation, and the platform funds mentorship and access for young people. "Eagles for Impact is a powerful example of how purpose and partnership - and the strength of our Integrated Firm - can come together to create lasting change," she says. She also guides the firm's brand-ambassador work, which reaches across sports: golfers Justin Rose and Cheyenne Woods, tennis champion Leylah Fernandez, and, more recently, a partnership with F1 Academy.
Ask Schnurr what shaped her taste and the answer is a lineup: Madonna, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Gwen Stefani, Sheryl Crow, Pink. She knew all the words, watched the MTV videos, tried to copy the dance moves. Pink stayed her favorite - for the voice, the energy, and a willingness to sing plainly about resilience and being yourself. This past summer she took her two daughters to see Pink perform and called it unforgettable.
That fandom is not a side note. The campaigns that move her most run on the same fuel. Nike's 2019 "Dream Crazier" spot with Serena Williams, she says, "hit me to the core." A person who still gets moved by other people's best work tends to make better work of her own, because she has not stopped believing an ad can do more than sell.
For all the campaigns, Schnurr talks about her team the way some people talk about the actual product. Coaching and mentoring, she says, are a huge part of the work, and her instinct is to give people what they need to succeed rather than hand down answers. She believes "the next generation will drive the best ideas," which is a useful thing for a senior marketer to actually mean.
She learned it partly by being on the receiving end. Her mentor of a decade is Mandell Crawley, Morgan Stanley's chief human resources officer, whom she describes as a positive and inspirational presence who consistently makes himself available. The habit went far enough that she recently completed a life-coaching course and loved it. Asked what she would do if she were not in advertising, she does not hesitate: life or career coaching.
Which brings it back to the ring. She has worn it on her right hand since she was 12, and it says one word: "Dream." It is a small object doing steady work - a reminder that the plan can change, that new ambitions are allowed at any age, and that the finance major who took one advertising class was onto something. The trading desk got a pass. The dream got the job.