Meet Hailey Hunter, an active member of AMA Philadelphia and Director of our Programming Committee!
Tell us about your role — what you do, and what does a typical day look like for you?
I’m a Senior Associate in Marketing Strategy for the Freedom credit card brand at JPMorganChase! My team facilitates the marketing strategy and execution for our existing cardmembers across several marketing channels with my focus mainly in email.
On a typical day, you can find me meeting with a myriad of partner teams that help us bring our campaigns to life. These meetings will range from the partners who will inform our marketing, like travel or sports & entertainment activations, the editorial and content teams who will build our beautiful campaigns, or the marketing execution managers who will deliver our campaigns to the right customers at the right time.
After those conversations, I’ll spend the rest of my week bringing these experts’ input together to fuel our overall communication strategy that excites cardmembers about the great perks they receive.
What’s a common misconception people have about your job or about marketing in your industry?
That marketing for a bank is boring! As brand identity has become so crucial, so have the marketing opportunities staffed to support it. Bank marketers work in every corner of marketing, advertising, and communications to bring the brand and its products to life.
Furthermore, all these elements that go into a lifestyle brand are opportunities to build a diverse career. Specifically with the lifestyle perks that coincide with credit cards, you have marketers ranging in work from influencer or talent management, facilitating brand activations, designing our web experience, curating our brand voice, building cutting-edge marketing analytics tools, reimagining the customer communication stream, and more!
When you self-reflect and ask yourself what you want to achieve out of your networking, it will spark authentic conversations and meaningful connections that will eventually become your support system throughout your career.
Hailey Hunter
What’s one marketing tool, habit, or framework you rely on more than anything else right now?
I always try to stay up to date in the industries relative to my industry. Yes, knowing all the players and best practices in my own industry is helpful, but it will only ever make me a reactive marketer, rather than a proactive one. To be proactive and create disruption, I try to keep up with what’s going on for consumers at large in how they’re interacting with brands they love. From travel, to loyalty programs, to media and entertainment, observing other industries has helped me think outside the box and stay in tune with consumer behavior rather than industry do’s and don’ts.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
This past fall, I read “We Might Just Make it After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade” by Elyce Arons and I don’t think I’ve ever cherished a book so much. It is an antidote to missing your long-distance friends and family, detailing the beautiful journey of female friendship, the small moments that make it so special, and how it evolves over decades. A beautiful retelling of Spade’s life over her death, it was an inside look of what can happen when friends pursue their passions and build something together.
From an industry perspective, I personally loved learning about how the empire was built. What will stick with me is the women’s treasured brand identity around being a milestone moment for young women, as that was my experience with buying my own first Kate Spade bag. I even wrapped it up and put it under the tree my first Christmas after starting my full-time job.
What are you looking forward to the most for the industry over the next year?
If last year was the year of AI, I’m interested to see how the industry finds balance between innovation and societal pushback on AI. Will overuse affect brand identity? What creative solutions will organizations develop to strike the right chord of using AI “the right way” for public perception.
This comes to fruition through observations of simple and humble marketing resonating with young people today. With many Gen Z new year’s resolutions making declarations like “the year of analog” or getting rid of the phone addictions, I’ve been keeping my eye on the subtle return of long-term content forums creeping back, such as Bilt’s “roomies” series on Instagram or the rise of SubStack.
What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
During my rotational program, I received advice to “raise your hand for the work no one wants to do”… stay with me. By adding that less-than-desirable work to your plate, not only does it build morale and a good reputation within your team, but it also teaches you something that you’d otherwise never learn.
For young professionals, this may sound obvious, as many of my peers are constantly raising their hands to take on as much work as possible to expedite their learnings. But do you only raise your hand when something is offered? Or when it makes sense for your book of work? When I waited around for relevant work, the opportunities never came. After receiving this advice and implementing it, I began identifying and pursuing work that would become essential to my toolkit and network.
This advice has helped me in multiple roles– from learning about legal marketing, budgeting, to business administration. I can now identify red flags in my campaign copy before they even go through legal, give updates to peers on details not in my scope because I compile everyone’s weekly updates, and ensure backlinks are set up correctly to drive to the right user experience, all because of not-so-fabulous workstreams I volunteered for. It was these opportunities that I made deeper connections and gained knowledge that has made me a more proactive and thoughtful marketer.
What advice would you give to the next generation of marketing leaders?
Show up in the community! This day in age, we are so isolated, chronically online, chronically alone for those of us who work at home. By becoming a member of an industry or personal interest organization, attending their events, and participating in their leadership opportunities you’ll build up your own network and skillset. Not only will this amplify your community outside the office, but it will broaden your abilities within the workplace by giving you real-world experience outside the sometimes tunnel-visioned scope of your day-to-day workstreams and organization.
When you unplug from work, where are you most likely to be in Philadelphia?
Weather permitting, after work you can find me on the Schuylkill Trail getting some much needed outdoor time after work! Then in the winter, I typically hibernate at my absolute favorite small business in Philadelphia – Evolve Dance. Growing up a dancer, it is a wonderful community for former dancers to meet, move, and feel joy!
What’s a mistake you made early on in your career?
When I started my first post-grad role, which was a rotational program through JPMC, I spent a lot of time “networking for the sake of networking.” That is, I had no objective for meeting with someone other than them being “a person I should know,” and feeling the need to check a box off my list. This often led to unproductive coffee chats, awkward moments, and a lack of genuine connections or learnings. Without taking the time to know my own ambitions, it became difficult to authentically ask the questions and invest in my network in a way that would make a true impact on my career.
It wasn’t until I spent time growing in my role, identifying areas of growth, and beginning to map out career goals that I then had a mission for my networking and was able to have productive and interesting conversations with peers and leaders. That is absolutely not to say that I needed to know exactly what I wanted to do and have an extremely specific objective for speaking with someone. It can be as simple as, I know I want to work in a collaborative environment that likes to experiment with marketing tactics: What is your team doing to achieve that? What have you learned or mistakes your team has made? What in your career brought you to experience that culture?
When you go into networking with just a list of names to check off, you’ll come out with just that… a list of names. When you self-reflect and ask yourself what you want to achieve out of your networking, it will spark authentic conversations and meaningful connections that will eventually become your support system throughout your career.
What’s one benefit of being an AMA Philadelphia member that you enjoy?
I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio, so as a transplant, I love the monthly Marketing Mix at 6 events we put on at AMA Philadelphia. This happy hour is where I’m able to meet colleagues in the industry and be caught up to speed on the thriving Philadelphia marketing community. Thanks to these events, I’ve been able to reach out to my growing Philadelphia network for career advice and opportunities to collaborate while being part of the Programming committee.