Valerie Jennings, JSMM CEO

Valerie Jennings has been a marketing visionary since founding her agency in 2003 at the age of 24. Her leadership as a digital marketer and early adopter of social media since 2005 has created jobs and mentorship opportunities for women and girls and provided innovative marketing strategies for agencies. She has demonstrated compassion and the foresight to stay the course during challenging times — not laying off any employees during the pandemic and instead incorporating innovation for future growth.
As CEO, Valerie is intimately involved with all client work, including ongoing research and strategy, execution, overseeing the responsibilities of the team, managing overseas teams, and around-the-clock availability to respond to valued clients.
The primary goal of JSMM is to help clients grow through the utilization of emerging technologies, serving and benefiting the global economy. As a visionary leader, she often predicts trends ahead of their time and supports theories with internal tests and data collection until she feels new opportunities are ready for clients. Valerie obtained a certification in artificial intelligence taught by leading minds — including Andrew Ng, Stanford University professor, who founded and led the Google Brain project, a program developed using mass-scale deep learning algorithms.
She's created a company culture that spans multiple time zones, languages, customs and beliefs. She's transitioned her agency from being predominantly centered in the Midwest to the coasts. Additionally, JSMM has created Hispanic outreach for clients by promoting diversity and inclusion in content and images. Because of these changes, new and diverse clients have flocked to the agency, representing global, publicly traded companies to Black-owned startups. Valerie’s leadership and vision are global. It’s about changing the mindset of others through positive examples and driving valuable, thought-provoking discussions among the C-suite.
Valerie received numerous awards and honors from the Stevie Awards, FOLIO:, AMBIT and more for entrepreneurship, digital marketing, women in business leadership and innovations in running a digital marketing agency. By introducing a new leadership vision and implementing performance-based AI and MarTech-focused strategies to innovate content marketing, SEO and digital advertising, Valerie continues to keep the agency relevant and competitive.