The world’s money, in motion

Heritage can sometimes get treated as something to apologize for. J.P. Morgan carries two centuries of it, and apologizing was never on the table. The question was how a brand with that much history could stay current without becoming someone else.

Reinvention was the wrong instinct from the start. A brand this certain of itself does not need a costume change. It needs everything already unmistakable about it turned up and brought forward with its power intact. So the platform began with a refusal: heritage and innovation would not be treated as opposites in need of balancing. They were held as one conviction, and the studios BUCK and NotReal were directed toward a system where the gravity of the institution and the velocity of modern money move together. The final piece was a creative team inside the bank, so the craft would outlast the launch.