The useful word in Jim Stadler’s recent career was sitting in plain sight, printed on every branch and debit card. Old. In ordinary advertising, the word is a problem to manage. After Old National Bank and First Midwest combined in 2022, it became a problem with a deadline. The merged bank had new territory, a surviving name and a need to explain itself quickly. Stadler, the incoming chief marketing officer, did not try to make the name sound younger. He helped turn it into the strategy.
The resulting platform, “Get Old,” carries a little mischief. Its ads make room for retirement, first checking accounts, fraud protection and businesses that need more space. The line can smile because the promise beneath it is sober: a bank relationship should gain value as a customer’s life gets more complicated. Experience, stability and continuity are the product before the product.
That idea also condenses Stadler’s own route into finance. He arrived with decades spent moving between consumer companies, a global agency, an independent Chicago shop and, finally, a regional bank. He had learned how brands earn attention. Banking taught him how carefully that attention must be handled.
A career built on both sides of the brief
Stadler studied economics and political science at Southern Methodist University from 1982 to 1986. The combination feels apt in retrospect. Marketing lives between incentives and people, between what can be counted and what a group decides to believe. His early career put that education into consumer settings, with senior marketing roles at Kimberly-Clark and McDonald’s.
He later moved to DDB Worldwide, serving as a senior vice president and group management director. Then came Schafer Condon Carter, the independent Chicago creative and technology agency, where he became managing partner and led business development. The agency years gave him a front-row view of the work before it becomes a media plan: finding the sharp thought, defending it, selling it and making it survive the trip through a large organization.
One account carried special resonance in Chicago. Stadler worked on the Cubs business during the team’s 2016 World Series season. It was a rare assignment where a brand’s long history and a city’s accumulated feeling suddenly had a new ending. Years later, at Old National, age and inheritance would again become raw materials rather than baggage.
In 2018, he crossed back to the client side as First Midwest Bank’s chief marketing and communications officer. The remit was wider than advertising. It included corporate communications, customer relationship management and client experience. That matters because a bank’s brand is not merely what it says. It is the application, the call center, the website conversion, the branch conversation and the follow-up that either happens or does not.
The work became unusually concrete during 2020. His team used customer relationship tools to process 6,400 applications for the Paycheck Protection Program, supporting businesses connected to 135,000 families. Marketing contributed 32 percent in incremental revenue to First Midwest’s retail effort. A redesigned website lifted conversions by 20 percent, while the multiyear “We Have Ideas” campaign produced more than 200 incremental commercial leads.
Those numbers explain his definition of modern marketing better than a trend deck could. Observe response rates. Watch how people react to an offer, a line of copy or a channel. Learn, adjust and return with a better version. Creativity supplies a reason to look. Measurement supplies a reason to improve.
Two banks, one name, and a word competitors could not borrow
When First Midwest merged with Old National in 2022, Stadler became chief marketing officer of the combined organization. Mergers arrive with many spreadsheets and one emotional question: what does this larger thing mean to the people who knew the smaller ones? Old National had more than a century of history, but in expansion markets its name was less familiar. A safe campaign could have listed products and reassured everyone that little would change.
Instead, the team chose a fact no competitor could borrow. Old was already in the name. It suggested longevity, but it could also feel slow or remote. “Get Old” flipped the tension. The campaign connected aging with accumulating needs and, ideally, better advice. At 18, a customer may need a first checking account. Later may come a home, a growing company, more credit or wealth management. The line made those life stages part of one relationship.
The order in that sentence is the operating manual. Trust first. Product second. Humor last. A bank does not earn playfulness by pretending the stakes are low. It earns it by making the underlying claim clear enough that a joke becomes an invitation, not a distraction. Stadler has said his first communications job is to make people pay attention. In a category he calls a “sea of sameness” and a “fog of familiarity,” attention is scarce inventory.
The platform has lasted because the word is bigger than any individual advertisement. A 2024 set of spots emphasized customer connections across community banking and wealth management. In 2026, three more films covered personal checking, fraud protection and commercial banking. The situations changed. The relationship across time remained the spine.
One platform, two clocks
over years
this week
Distribution is where the broad idea becomes local. Much of Old National’s media has moved toward connected online video, CTV, streaming audio and digital placements. In key Midwestern markets, the bank can concentrate spending within roughly five miles of each branch instead of buying linear television across an entire market. Upper-funnel work builds recognition. Programmatic, search, social, direct mail and email ask for action farther down.
It is a two-clock system. The brand platform has to compound for years; activation has to create feedback now. Stadler’s approach refuses the false choice between a memorable campaign and accountable media. One gives the other a job to do.
Regional scale still has to feel like a place
Stadler’s public work repeatedly joins expansion with local presence. Old National’s Big Ten partnership, announced in 2023, was framed as more than logo inventory. The plan connected awareness and client experiences with financial education for student-athletes and community impact. It matched a Midwestern footprint with an institution whose loyalties already travel across the same map.
His Chicago commitments follow a similar pattern. Stadler serves on the board of First Tee - Greater Chicago, which uses golf to teach resilience and character to young people. He also sits on the board of Chicago Shakespeare Theater. One organization works on public courses and youth facilities; the other stages stories on Navy Pier and in neighborhoods across the city. Together they reveal a civic range wider than the usual trade-group biography.
There is no need to turn those roles into a grand theory of personality. The observable pattern is enough: he spends professional time making a regional institution legible to communities, then lends board time to organizations rooted in Chicago. Scale is useful, but it becomes meaningful in particular places, among particular people.
Recognition followed the work. Crain’s Chicago Business included Stadler among its notable marketing executives in 2020, and First Midwest announced another selection in 2021. A changing Old National billboard in Chicago was named a finalist in the 2025 OBIE Awards, with the agency crediting Stadler among the client collaborators. Awards are snapshots. The more revealing achievement is that one simple platform has remained usable while the bank, its markets and its product stories have kept moving.
Still in the early innings
Stadler talks about “Get Old” in baseball time. Five years into the platform, he has said the bank is only in the third or fourth inning of defining the idea. The metaphor fits someone whose agency chapter included that Cubs account, but it also describes the discipline of a durable brand. Do not replace the organizing thought every season. Change the situations, products and executions. Preserve the memory customers have already paid attention to.
The useful lesson from his career is not that every awkward company name can become a joke. It is that constraints can reveal the claim no competitor can credibly steal. Old National had its history, its name and the relationship model it wanted to defend. Stadler’s contribution was to line those pieces up, then give them a voice light enough to travel.
That voice now has range. It can speak to an 18-year-old opening an account, an owner standing in a new warehouse, a customer thinking about fraud or a family planning wealth. The details change because people do. The two-word invitation stays put, collecting meaning as it goes. For a marketer who believes in learning, optimizing and returning with a better version, even “old” remains unfinished.