At Sundance in 2014, Jessica Meisels woke from a nap and began handing out trash bags. Around her, the rented chalet had been doing what a chalet full of publicists, clients and celebrity guests might be expected to do during a film festival. The atmosphere had grown lively. The rubbish, presumably, had not volunteered to remove itself. Here was an unusually useful portrait of a publicity executive: close enough to the party to make it happen, sufficiently responsible for it to start the cleanup.
Fingerprint Communications, the agency she co-founded in 2003, had rented a three-story house overlooking Deer Valley. Kellan Lutz and Krysten Ritter were among the overnight guests; dinners brought more people through the doors. A house could accommodate work, friendship and promotion without requiring everyone to stand under a fluorescent conference-room light. It could also require a formidable amount of looking after.
Meisels’s career keeps returning to this business of assembling people. The settings change: Manhattan fashion, Malibu, a film festival, Formula 1. Behind the scene is a practical question about attention. What would make these particular people want to spend time together? And once they arrived, what might they remember?
An education in introductions
Born and raised in New York City, Meisels encountered publicity through college internships at couture fashion houses and an entertainment PR firm. Women who had already made careers in the business became her mentors. A summer spent around entertainment clients helped settle her ambition: she wanted to work in PR, and the thought of running an agency had begun to take shape.
After graduating from the University of Maryland, she worked for a New York publicist who continued that apprenticeship. Her official career account also includes work with Bottega Veneta, Chanel and Bulgari. Fashion was an education in how an object acquires a social meaning. A handbag can be beautifully made and still need someone to explain why anybody should pay attention to it.
The agency she went on to co-found had a broader brief than obtaining a mention in print. Meisels wanted publicity, marketing and relationships with recognizable talent to work together. That ambition would eventually find expression in consumer products, hospitality, travel and entertainment. The common problem was making a brand interesting in somebody else’s life.
A room with a commercial purpose
By 2008, Fingerprint was in its third consecutive year overseeing a Malibu beach-house program. Meisels described a distinction that could easily disappear beneath the sunglasses and catering: guests were supposed to learn something about products. In the earlier Polaroid program, that included discovering that a name associated with photographs also appeared on televisions.
“You come here, you experience the brands”
Jessica Meisels · 2008
For Project Beach House, branding was deliberately restrained. The setting gave different products ordinary jobs to do. Meisels also discussed permits, city monitors and moving to a property that reduced problems for neighbors. Even an invitation-only summer has a municipal dimension. Glamour is quite capable of generating paperwork.
There is a modest but revealing idea here. A person may ignore an explanation delivered as advertising, then absorb the same information while enjoying an afternoon. Hospitality gives the information a setting. The arrangement still has a commercial purpose, but the guest has something to do besides receive a pitch. For a publicist, the difficult work lies in making the experience coherent enough that the product fits.
The business behind the invitation
The company’s history includes an abrupt rupture. In April 2010, co-founder Gregory Link said he wanted to dissolve the partnership. Nine employees resigned together during the dispute. Meisels opposed dissolution and said she was concentrating on clients. Accounts of the circumstances differed, including the departure of managing director Carol Bell.
A dispute like that interrupts the comfortable assumption that a publicity agency is simply its founder’s address book with an office attached. There are colleagues, ownership arrangements and obligations to clients. Each person has relationships of their own. When a team breaks apart, the division reaches beyond desks and stationery.
The later record establishes that Fingerprint continued working. In June 2011, Meisels won Publicist/PR Executive of the Year in the inaugural BizBash West Readers’ Choice Awards. Readers nominated professionals and then voted on finalists. The award belonged to a particular community: people who organized events and understood the work behind them.
The dispute and the recognition sit close together in the chronology. They resist a polished founder story in which every difficulty arrives conveniently disguised as a lesson. The public record gives us an upheaval, followed by further work. That is enough to make the continuity matter.
Snow, cameras and a willing beginner
Oakley Learn to Ride gave Meisels’s agency a format with an activity at its center. Professional athletes became teachers; celebrities became learners. Surfing, snowboarding and racecar experiences could produce encounters in which the participants had something more interesting to do than hold a product toward a lens.
The appealing reversal is built into the arrangement. Fame does not automatically confer competence on a snowboard. An accomplished athlete has knowledge the recognizable visitor needs. The brand’s sporting identity belongs naturally in that exchange, while the celebrity brings another audience to the activity.
Air New Zealand offered a different kind of assignment. Fingerprint worked on celebrity videos around Rico, the airline’s mascot, with participants including Snoop Dogg and David Hasselhoff. Here the occasion was a filmed encounter rather than a lesson. The underlying arrangement still joined a company’s message to a person people already wanted to watch.
These campaigns help explain the range of Meisels’s work without reducing it to a list of famous acquaintances. A relationship creates the possibility of an introduction. The campaign needs a premise that makes the introduction worth watching. Otherwise, everyone has gone to considerable trouble to produce a photograph with very little happening in it.
When a name becomes a product
In August 2011, Fingerprint handled PR and marketing for the Kardashian Kollection launch for Sears at the Colony in Los Angeles. The event brought together apparel, the sisters’ public identities and a crowd of cameras. Models posed on miniature red carpets. Large images of Kourtney, Kim and Khloé became part of the room.
The details are almost a diagram of celebrity commerce. The personalities were present as guests, as designers and as images. The clothes were the immediate product, while the names supplied a reason for attention. Several forms of promotion could operate at once, all inside the same evening.
Meisels later recalled the expanding scope of that work: “Personal brand work turned to merchandise and on and on.” A publicist working through that shift had to keep following the subject as it moved between entertainment, retail and personal identity. The assignment could grow each time the recognizable name appeared in a new place.
Her more recent recollections of Los Angeles nightlife also place her inside the social world surrounding those businesses. She contributed to a 2025 oral history of the city’s early-2000s clubs. That history helps explain her professional setting: rooms in which attendance itself could become news, and introductions could acquire a life outside the evening.
A reading of the formats in her work, rather than a measure of campaign results.
A reason to return
By 2018, Meisels was talking about brands wanting more substantive festival programming. Fingerprint’s JetSmarter Music in Film Summit at Park City Live gave filmmakers, actors and other guests a platform around their projects. The program also included nighttime concerts, with Post Malone among the performers.
“We have seen brands really want more intelligent programming that feels organic,” she said. The observation carried a practical implication. Familiar faces had other invitations. A sponsor needed to offer a useful occasion, particularly when guests could publish their own experiences and audiences could recognize an empty promotional arrangement.
That shift gave an experienced organizer another problem to solve. Getting through the door was only one part of attending. Guests might want an exchange, an audience for their work or a conversation they could carry elsewhere. The event had to justify its place in their day.
Later work extended into Williams Racing. Meisels described that collaboration as beginning with a friend and former colleague who had joined the team. In February 2026, her name also appeared as a Fingerprint media contact on VERZA TV’s announcement of a new micro-drama development executive. The credit is a small, concrete sign of publicity work continuing as entertainment formats change.
The people outside the guest list
For someone whose working life involves arranging attention, Meisels’s account of satisfaction is strikingly domestic. She has spoken about her two children as her greatest accomplishments and about wanting to lead by example. Travel and the chance to work with many kinds of people also feature in her explanation of why the career has remained rewarding.
Her wedding to racecar driver Matt Halliday took place at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea. In the photographs, the professional arranger of other people’s occasions gets an occasion of her own. The image supplies a welcome change of scale after all the campaigns and clients.
There are many ways to describe publicity, most of them more abstract than the work appears to require. Meisels’s career offers concrete scenes instead: an apprentice watching experienced women work; a product finding a place in a beach house; an athlete teaching a celebrity; a founder managing a company through a rupture.
And there is that Sundance morning, with the trash bags. A gathering may be conceived in a meeting and remembered in a photograph. Someone still has to take responsibility for the room.