The Indianapolis Agency That Put a Price Tag on Creative Work

The peculiar thing about a giant is that it makes everyone else look small. This is useful to remember when visiting JDA Worldwide’s website, where the recurring instruction is to “slay giants.” The phrase sounds like advertising bravado until the agency starts supplying measurements. A $100 million attraction funded. A parking idea projected to produce roughly $5 million a year. A sportswear launch that reached every American state in 72 hours. The giant, in JDA’s telling, is not another agency. It is the distance between what a client imagines and what the market will actually reward.

JDA is a privately held, full-service marketing and communications firm headquartered in downtown Indianapolis, with offices in Nashville and Washington, D.C. The legal entity is Joseph David Advertising, a name drawn from two Old Testament figures. It began operating in 2003 under co-founder Brad Benbow and today sits inside Prolific, the broader growth firm he chairs. His son Chance joined JDA in 2017, became chief executive in 2023 and inherited a business that is both forthrightly faith-informed and commercially ecumenical: restaurants, sports apparel, nonprofits, attractions, healthcare groups, banks and consumer brands all appear in its public work.

Six disciplines, one neck to grab

The menu is familiar: brand strategy, campaign creative, public relations, web and app development, digital marketing and paid media. Paid buying is supported by Conquer, a specialist operation in the Prolific family. The advantage is not novelty. It is continuity. Instead of asking one shop to write the positioning, another to pitch the story and a third to build the page where interest lands, JDA can make the pieces answer to the same objective.

Prime Hospitality Group is the tidy example. JDA’s brief crossed 15 restaurant locations, a hotel and the corporate brand. The work included openings, relocations, rebrands, websites, loyalty programs, email, social, paid campaigns, public relations and community outreach. The client’s marketing manager described the arrangement as one marketing department split across two companies. That sentence explains the business model better than “full service” does. JDA sells projects and continuing relationships, but the higher-value proposition is an external department that can follow a problem across channels.

We only want clients who see us as a partner, and not a vendor.Chance Benbow

This also establishes the boundary. JDA says it declines brands concerned only with self-interest and prefers organizations pursuing some form of positive impact. A buyer looking for an anonymous production bench, the cheapest isolated deliverable or flattering numbers without operational access is a poor fit. Integration works only when the agency can see the business problem, and values alignment works only when both parties accept the narrowing it creates.

The case study becomes a ledger

Agency portfolios usually stop at the attractive artifact. JDA’s better pages continue to the consequence. Consider Unitus, the values-based sports and lifestyle label founded by Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac. Isaac arrived with a logo and an idea. JDA built the go-to-market strategy, public-relations plan, creative content, social presence, email database and ecommerce storefront around it.

Within 72 hours, Unitus had orders from all 50 states and dozens of countries. In the first half-year, revenue reached 200 percent of projection. A directed video collected 3.5 million views in under six months, while the storefront recorded 1.1 million sessions in nine months. One five-minute television interview generated six-figure sales in a day - about a tenth of the company’s projected annual revenue. These are JDA’s own reported case-study figures, and they show the mechanism: clear positioning made the media appearance legible; PR created concentrated attention; the storefront caught it; email preserved some of it.

Research changed the assignment

The Ark Encounter story is stranger, and therefore more revealing. While working on a strategic plan for Answers in Genesis, JDA says its research identified Noah’s Ark as the leading reason surveyed skeptics rejected the Bible’s truth. A conventional agency might have answered with a message. JDA helped advance a physical answer: a life-size ark, 510 feet long.

The work expanded beyond advertising into strategic planning, public and private fundraising, guest experience, attendance strategy and new revenue. The visible cost was the attraction itself - $100 million - rather than a disclosed agency invoice. JDA says it helped present the plan to Kentucky officials, banks and donors until the full construction amount was raised. It also says one recommendation produced a 20-times return and that parking, absent from the original projections, became an approximately $5 million annual revenue stream.

Here is the change-of-mind moment: research did not merely tune the campaign. It reframed the object being marketed. The insight pointed toward building the attraction, and the assignment widened until marketing touched finance and operations. That is possible when a client gives an agency access and trust. It is much less plausible inside a narrowly scoped request for ads, or when the research result is allowed only to confirm an idea already approved.

What another company can copy

The transferable part of JDA is not its theology or even its service list. It is the order of operations. Start with the stubborn obstacle. Decide which behavior would prove the obstacle moved. Assemble only the channels needed to produce that behavior. Then publish the result with enough context that a reader can tell whether it matters.

There is evidence that this approach has also worked on JDA itself. During the 2020 advertising contraction, when marketing budgets were commonly first in line for cuts, JDA and Prolific moved from a 3,000-square-foot Carmel office to an 18,000-square-foot downtown headquarters. Indiana offered up to $2.2 million in performance-based tax credits tied to an ambitious job plan. The legal entity has appeared on the Inc. 5000 in multiple years; in 2025 it ranked No. 4,008 after 90 percent three-year growth. The wider Prolific group has claimed a longer consecutive run.

Growth claims can become agency wallpaper. JDA is more convincing when it stays specific: a due date beside the deliverable, a strategic recommendation before the client asks, a sales number after the interview. “High grace and high expectations” is how the firm describes its internal culture. The phrase works as a client proposition too. Grace allows the people in the room to admit what is not working. Expectations require them to put a number beside what happens next.

JDA is the reason the world is wearing Unitus.Jonathan Isaac, founder of Unitus

The agency market is crowded with giant networks, sharp boutiques, specialist media buyers and competent in-house teams. JDA sits between them: larger in capability than a studio, smaller and more selective than a public conglomerate, and willing to operate like an embedded department. Its faith-informed position will attract some organizations and exclude others. That is not incidental to the model. It is how a generalist service business gives itself a point of view.

The amusing paradox is that an agency fond of giants has built its case from little acts of accounting. A parking fee. A website session. An email address. An order placed after breakfast television. Dreams remain in the headline, where they belong. Down in the work, somebody is counting.