Building trust—and financial literacy—Thru athlete stories
Professional athletes often earn significant income early in their careers, while navigating complex financial decisions—with limited preparation. Their experiences offer powerful lessons about financial literacy, discipline, and long-term planning.
At JPMorgan Chase, our team developed storytelling initiatives that tapped into the voices of professional athletes to explore the realities of making financial decisions under intense public scrutiny.
The premise was simple: treat financial education as cultural storytelling — content that felt authentic and human, while reinforcing the institution’s broader role as a financial partner. While athletes may be wealthy, the financial lessons they share resonate across audiences and income groups.
The Context
50M+
People reached across JPMorgan Chase and media partner channels.
I helped lead the development of a digital communications program built around first-person narratives from professional athletes reflecting on their financial journeys.
The strategy paired candid storytelling with practical financial insight, allowing athletes to share lessons about money, risk, and long-term planning — often framed as advice they wished they had received earlier in their careers.
the work
Key Series
To bring these stories to broader audiences, we collaborated with The Players’ Tribune and Business Insider.
The partnership centered on the Tribune’s popular “Letter to My Younger Self” franchise, in which athletes reflect candidly on their early careers and the financial decisions that shaped their lives. The stories we produced appeared across the Tribune, Business Insider, and JPMorgan Chase channels.
1. The Players’ Tribune
2. Kneading Dough
JPMorgan Chase partnered with LeBron James’ production company, Uninterrupted, to create Kneading Dough, a video-driven series in which professional athletes shared lessons from their personal finance journeys. The series featured LeBron, Serena Williams, Ben Simmons, and other athletes reflecting on the realities of earning, managing, and planning for money over the course of a career.
My team expanded the concept into text-based and social-first formats, allowing the storytelling to travel more widely across JPMorgan Chase’s digital channels.
3. This mama
JPMorgan Chase launched “This Mama,” a campaign featuring Serena Williams tied to her return to the U.S. Open. I worked with the company’s sponsorship team to shape how the campaign appeared on our owned platforms, including a text-based Q&A in which Serena shared insights on navigating motherhood, professional sports, and entrepreneurship.
