Edward Jones is a financial services firm with more than 100 years in operation, 20,000 advisors and 15,000 branches. But to bring that heritage to a larger, more diverse audience, the firm last year launched efforts around sports and advertising.
The firm partnered with the football Big 12 Conference to become the title sponsor of the conference championship and the first official wealth management partner for an event which includes universities like Oklahoma State, West Virginia and Kansas State. The partnership included charity efforts combating food insecurity and increasing financial literacy.
Edward Jones also built on a “Let’s find your rich” campaign with ads featuring actor Milo Ventimiglia, best known for “Gilmore Girls” and “This Is Us,” as a financial advisor that explores what matters most for consumers in spots running on TV and in digital channels.
Both efforts came during the first several months of the tenure of Hema Widhani, who was appointed chief brand, experience and marketing Officer in June 2025. Previously, the executive served as chief digital and marketing officer at Prudential Financial, where she spent more than a decade in various roles.
Marketing Dive spoke with Widhani about the recent marketing efforts, how she sees the evolution of the CMO role and how Edward Jones is approaching artificial intelligence.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: How does the Big 12 sponsorship fit into Edward Jones’ marketing strategy?
HEMA WIDHANI: I think about it as a brand moment, but I also think about it as participating in culture. We're really trying to expand our audience to a more multigenerational audience.
The wealth management space tends to be for rich people, and we are really trying to make sure that wealth management is accessible to everybody. We're trying to target generations that are younger than the generations that have access to wealth managers today, because we believe wealth management and managing money needs to start much earlier.
The college sports scene is really important to us, not just culturally, but it’s actually for [multiple] generations at the game. Anything that we do is not just client-audience targeted. It's also multistakeholder. It was very much in the communities. We do a lot of financial literacy programs that really need to start in schools and colleges, especially with NIL and kids getting so much money with sports.
What insight drove the new “Let’s find your rich” ads?
One of the things that I realized coming in is we are such a strong regional presence, but we're not a strong national brand just yet. We are not as known in the coasts and the South, as well as with younger generations, as we would like to be. However, our branch presence and our advisor presence is everywhere. We believe that there is a lot of value to be added in normal people's lives, and we believe recognition of our brand is really important to that, because people just don't know us and know our value prop.
For us, this was a recognition campaign that would at least run six months, but could also run beyond. It was really important then with the recognition component to have our advisors be showcased, which is why the celebrity component was important and integrated.
What does Ventimiglia bring to the ads?
We've never used a celebrity in our campaigns in the past, so this was a big moment for us. The choice around Milo was very intentional. We looked at a lot of data around his multigenerational appeal. We had data that there is significant appeal across three generations, but particularly millennials and younger, as well as with women, which will be a segment that we will pay more attention to in the future.
Your title, chief brand, experience and marketing officer, speaks to the changes we’re seeing in the marketing organization. How does the title speak to your role?
It's been really exciting to walk into the company's history at this point in time. We are a very well known but also highly trusted financial services brand. We have 20,000 advisors, we're one of the largest financial advisory firms in the country, and we have a client in every county in the United States.
As we thought about this role, we’re at a point in our evolution that we really want to focus on the emerging client. We want to focus on today's client, but also tomorrow's client. And the [executive leadership team] believed that the CBEMO role is the central point for that voice of the client.
The way we think about our role in my organization is to be that unapologetically bold voice of the current client and the future client that then opens up the world, particularly with experiences, to a whole new way for us to be thinking about advice.
How does AI play into the wealth management space and your marketing work?
One of our strategic advantages is the fact that we are so personal in our advice. In this AI enabled world, how do we be that intersection of AI and personal advice?
We are using AI pretty heavily from an employee perspective. The reason that impacts clients is we are able to now see a world of personalization at scale that we weren't able to before. From a client perspective, it becomes really important for our teams not just to be more productive, but to be more personalized. We have some seed investments that we're making in AI where we're starting to see the benefits of that already.
We're still trying to figure out that intersection of AI and marketing and client facing propositions around personalization. Trust is really important — the most important thing in our business — and our brand data says that is a very big deal for our clients, as well.
