Brad Benbow gave his chief financial officer a sales assignment. Almera Mahmood had to close a deal, then manage the client relationship for the length of the contract. She recalled working it out from scratch, drawing on what she had observed rather than a coaching program. For someone usually seeing clients through their receivables, it was an education in what happened before the invoice.
The assignment makes a useful introduction to Benbow, chairman and CEO of Prolific. His career has repeatedly crossed the boundaries that businesses draw around themselves: advertising and consulting, strategy and execution, the people who recommend an investment and the people who actually make one. A finance executive learning sales belongs comfortably in that history. The organizational chart may have neat boxes. The customer seldom does.
Mahmood welcomed the experience. Her account of it, in 2023, offers something more revealing than a company mission statement: a concrete example of how Benbow encouraged a colleague to learn. It also supplies a modest warning to anyone expecting professional development to consist entirely of a comfortable chair and a webinar. Sometimes the curriculum comes with a client.
A cable salesman’s expanding territory
Benbow grew up in Muncie, Indiana, and graduated from Wabash College in 1983. He studied economics, then began his career with Ackerman & McQueen in Dallas. The combination put him at the meeting point of commercial calculation and persuasion. Economics asks what people choose; advertising asks how to enter the conversation before they choose it.
In late 1987, he co-founded Rutter Communications Network. Its business was selling cable television advertising. King Lumpkin became its first account executive in 1988, beginning a working relationship that would continue into JDA Worldwide. There is something pleasingly unfashionable about that detail in a business fascinated by the next new thing: one of the important connections started before the internet became an advertising department.
Rutter grew into a national representation firm. Its work expanded as clients asked for more, eventually including the services of a full advertising agency. By 1996, the business was working with Ameritech on growth and strategic planning. The distance between selling an advertising slot and helping a company decide how to grow had become traversable.
In 2003, the full-service agency operation was spun off as JDA Worldwide, which Benbow co-founded. Rutter was sold to Comcast in 2005. The transaction closed one chapter while leaving another open: the agency had already begun its separate life. For Benbow, cable advertising was a starting point from which the scope of the work kept widening.
The agency named for two other people
Joseph David Advertising sounds as though it ought to belong to a pair of founding partners. Neither Joseph nor David was available for the opening meeting. The names refer to the biblical Joseph and King David, reflecting the agency’s emphasis on interpretation, trusted advice, creativity and courage. Benbow’s faith was visible in the business before it became the subject of a book.
His connections included Answers in Genesis. In March 2008, he joined Ken Ham and Becky Manley in receiving a National Religious Broadcasters award for a television commercial promoting the Creation Museum. That is an early, specific instance of the overlap between his professional work and religious commitments. The relationship would also include board service.
JDA became more selective about the companies it worked with. In 2014, its leadership focused on clients with substantial ambitions. A year later, it acquired Hanon McKendry, adding creative staff in Grand Rapids and Colorado Springs; Bill McKendry became a co-owner. Expansion involved both choosing clients differently and bringing more capability into the company.
Benbow put his preference plainly in 2017: “We consider ourselves interpreters of dreams.” He wanted a voice in the process and relationships able to withstand the fluctuations of a growing company. The implication was practical. A firm hired only to produce a campaign has less room to question whether the campaign is solving the right problem.
“We consider ourselves interpreters of dreams.”
Brad Benbow, 2017
When the agency’s name became too small
By December 2019, Benbow was ready to put a broader structure around the work. Prolific launched as JDA’s parent company, offering growth planning and management consulting. The scope included capital, analytics, distribution systems, mergers and acquisitions. Those are substantial additions to an agency brief. A new logo, however attractive, cannot supply a distribution system.
Benbow described the move as a response to a business that had long combined advertising with consulting. He also pointed to investment in clients, an activity outside the usual agency arrangement. The new parent gave that mixture a more legible home. It allowed someone seeking advice, marketing execution or capital to approach the same group.
Prolific’s downtown Indianapolis headquarters opened in 2020. Benbow connected the choice of Indiana to its affordability, accessibility and ability to attract talent, along with a culture he felt suited the business. The office itself received design awards. His operation had become geographically dispersed, but Indianapolis supplied a common address for an increasingly complicated enterprise.
The structure has three connected parts: strategy, agencies and capital. Each carries a different responsibility, from deciding where growth might come from to executing the work and supporting expansion financially. It also makes Benbow’s commercial proposition easier to understand. He is asking to participate in more of a company’s decisions, with more ways to act on them.
Decide where to grow.
Put the plan to work.
Invest in expansion.
The customer a spreadsheet might miss
In August 2022, Benbow and Phil Daniels published Spiritugraphics: The Influence of Faith on Consumption and Why It Matters to Your Brand. The title adds an admittedly considerable word to the marketer’s vocabulary. Its underlying question is straightforward: do religious beliefs influence what people buy, where they shop and the messages they respond to?
The authors used a national behavioral study conducted by America’s Research Group and organized their findings into ten areas for brands to consider. The argument extends familiar demographic and psychological descriptions of customers by asking about spiritual beliefs. For Benbow, a Christian working in communications, it gave research form to a question close to his own experience.
In a jointly written essay later that year, he and Daniels described faith-driven respondents’ preference for neighborhood stores and community relationships. The point is useful without turning every shopper into a category: beliefs can affect the meaning attached to a purchase. Two customers can have similar ages and incomes while valuing quite different things about the same shop.
The book’s premise also places a responsibility on marketers. Understanding an audience requires asking questions rather than substituting a convenient stereotype. A religious identity alone does not explain every purchase. Benbow’s contribution here is to insist that a dimension of customers’ lives deserves attention, then bring survey research into that conversation.
A family name, and work behind it
In March 2023, JDA named Benbow’s son Chance its CEO. Chance had joined in 2017 as executive vice president, then served as Prolific’s chief marketing officer. His appointment followed years inside the organization, including responsibility for marketing, communications and company culture. The familiar surname came with an operating history.
Brad’s public endorsement emphasized that Chance “lives out our intended values.” That phrase connects the family relationship to an expectation about conduct. With Brad leading the parent and Chance leading JDA, the arrangement also made the distinction between those businesses visible in the leadership itself.
There are other relationships behind the titles. Brad and his wife, Julie, have three grown sons. His book dedication calls Julie his advisor and friend and acknowledges the travel and late nights that accompanied his work. The dedication gives the corporate biography a domestic cost: somebody else lived with the schedule while the businesses acquired more capabilities.
Brad and Julie are St. Louis Cardinals fans, and his favored place is beside the lake in Traverse City, Michigan. These details suggest a life with loyalties beyond the portfolio. An executive can spend years talking about expansion and still have a particular stretch of shoreline to which he wants to return.
Indiana, with a wider invitation
Benbow’s public work has continued to widen. In 2025, he and JDA colleague Johnnie Moore were involved in connecting Indiana’s business community with Israeli startups through Iron Nation, a venture fund. Benbow saw compatibility between the state’s economy and Israel’s entrepreneurial activity, including technology and agriculture. His Indiana ties became part of an international business proposition.
That same year, Prolific organized its first Growth Summit at RALLY in Indianapolis, with speakers including Hobby Lobby founder David Green and author Patrick Lencioni. The event extended Benbow’s interest in bringing executives together. Advice could circulate through a room as well as through a client engagement.
Recognition has accompanied those activities. Benbow was an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2021 and again in 2024, and was named to the 2025 Indiana 250. In February 2026, he discussed his career, mentorship and faith with Nate Feltman on Off the Record. In April, Brad and Julie were listed among Wabash’s Day of Giving lead challenge donors, a connection to the college continuing more than four decades after graduation.
The open door in East Central Indiana
Another expression of the family’s commitments is the Benbow Family Legacy Grant at Treefort Indiana. It supports families providing homes for children in crisis when money presents an obstacle. Treefort’s account of Brad and Julie recalls generosity, Julie’s work with children at an elementary school and the open door of their home during their sons’ teenage years.
This is a smaller setting than a national agency network or an international startup partnership, but it belongs in the same portrait. The grant concerns a specific barrier and a practical way to help someone move past it. The family name is attached to making room for other families.
Return to the CFO with a sales assignment. Benbow asked a colleague to understand a business relationship from a different position. His own career has depended on repeatedly doing something similar: taking on work beyond the initial job description, and finding people who can help carry it. After cable slots, agency briefs, investment decisions and a book, the questions have grown broader. They still begin with people.