The Greenville Agency That Turned Public Relations Into a Scoreboard

In late 1990, Jeff Dezen had a problem that sounds almost quaint now: he was comfortable. He had worked in nonprofit marketing and built a public-relations department for another agency. Starting over would mean giving up the sure thing, so he called his father, a Maryland tire-store owner, to talk it through. The reply was brief: “You’re too young to be comfortable, so get busy.” On January 1, 1991, Dezen opened an agency in his Greenville home.

The line has survived because it contains the founding logic of JDPR. Comfort is dangerous in a business whose distribution system keeps changing. In 1991, a publicist worked with a relatively tidy set of newspapers, magazines and broadcasters. Today the same assignment may involve a trade editor, a local morning show, a YouTube reviewer, a Google search ad, a landing page and, lately, the answer composed by an AI chatbot.

JDPR changed with that system. It moved from the home to East Coffee Street in 1997, spent decades building specialist knowledge in golf and tools, added social and digital work, and widened again into paid media, influencer campaigns and what it calls AiO or GEO - content intended to make brands more legible to large language models. Yet its most useful habit is older than any of those channels. Every client discussion, the agency says, begins with a question: What does success look like for you?

The unit of work is a business problem

That question separates a communication objective from a business objective. “Get press” is the former. “Fill classrooms,” “sell a new cordless platform,” and “enter North America” are the latter. JDPR's published work is most convincing when the distinction is obvious.

GREEN Charter Schools wanted qualified parents for campuses across South Carolina. JDPR built a campaign landing page, bought Google and Facebook ads, and added streaming television once enrollment targets were reached. Over three months, the schools achieved 160% of their enrollment goal. Festool needed awareness and adoption for a cordless tool line. The plan mixed trade coverage, executive interviews, product seeding, influencers and a six-figure advertising buy. It delivered more than 70 million impressions, 238% of the target, while Festool reached its sales goals.

The work is not mysterious. It is a sequence: name the commercial result, find the audience, identify the moment when that audience is paying attention, then choose the right mixture of earned and purchased attention. The final step is reporting. That last part matters because public relations has long been haunted by the suspicion that it is taking credit for weather.

“What does success look like for you?” is a better opening question than “Where should we post?”JDPR's strategy in one sentence

A mower, two conventions and an airport walkway

Consider Kress. The European outdoor-power brand entered North America in 2022 with commercial battery equipment and satellite-guided robotics. A launch in this market is not merely a product announcement. Dealers need confidence. Landscapers need to understand unfamiliar technology. Specialist journalists need access. The equipment itself needs to be seen doing something more memorable than sitting beneath exhibition lights.

For a later launch of the 40-inch Kress Voyager autonomous mower, JDPR concentrated activity around Equip Expo and the National Association of Landscape Professionals' Elevate conference. It arranged a keynote unveiling, show-directory and app advertising, branded refreshment spaces, hotel keycards, and a moving-walkway billboard at the preferred airport. Then came the human work: 37 dedicated media appointments.

The results more than doubled the previous year's earned coverage. The lesson is not that everyone should buy airport billboards shaped by the route to a convention center. It is that concentrated attention has geography. For landscape equipment, the crucial map briefly narrows to two trade shows, their hotels and one airport. A good specialist agency knows when the entire industry is standing in the same hallway.

The strange advantage of knowing golf

JDPR's deepest category memory may be golf. It has worked with Bridgestone Golf since at least 2004 and has represented brands including Cobra Puma Golf and Golf Pride. Golf looks like a leisure category, but communicating it requires fluency in product cycles, ball construction, club technology, tour-player contracts and a compact press ecosystem.

In 2024, Bridgestone needed to introduce TOUR B balls and MINDSET, a visual marking designed to support a golfer's pre-shot routine. JDPR split the story among recognizable characters. Tiger Woods was connected to the ball's design. Jason Day carried the MINDSET story. Day's mental coach explained the mechanism. The PGA Merchandise Show supplied the room. In under five months, the campaign produced more than 100 media hits with an audience above 75 million.

This is what category expertise looks like when stripped of agency language. It means knowing which claims need an athlete, which need a technical explainer, and which day of the calendar gives both a reason to be interviewed. It also means accepting that the formula does not travel intact. A tightly networked enthusiast market rewards long relationships and concentrated launches. A low-interest commodity, an unknown category with no credible proof, or a crisis that demands independent investigation will not yield simply because the media list is excellent.

The idea that outlived the campaign

In 2011, IRWIN Tools wanted to thank the electricians, plumbers, builders and carpenters who formed its market. JDPR turned the sentiment into National Tradesmen Day, held on the third Friday of September. The program used media outreach, a one-morning radio tour, a public-service announcement, a website and social communication. Across three campaigns it produced 700 million impressions. Michigan and Ohio lawmakers formally recognized the day.

This was a clever piece of brand positioning because the product stayed at the edge of the frame. IRWIN was not claiming its pliers could repair American attitudes toward skilled labor. It was giving a neglected audience a public thank-you and attaching the brand to the gesture. A campaign became a recurring date, which meant each September arrived with a new reason to tell the story.

The employee who bought the company

Succession arrived in stages. Jeff's son Drew joined in 2013 after working in Major League Baseball's international marketing operation in Australia. He later led the agency for nearly six years, expanding its services and national roster. In February 2026, ownership moved outside the family but not outside the firm. Matt Lochel, who had also joined in 2013, purchased JDPR and became president and chief executive.

Lochel's route matters. He had been a network-news producer, writing scripts and editing footage, with experience around the 2006 Lebanon War and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At JDPR he rose from account executive to strategy and client-service leadership. He helped launch Verizon's 4G LTE communications and worked on National Tradesmen Day. The buyer already knew where the company's habits were stored.

The change in ownership coincided with a sharper description of the business: not simply public relations, but full-service marketing communications. Paid-media leadership was added. Earned-media leadership was reframed around content innovation. AI discovery joined the service list. The old category boundary was the first thing to give way, but earned media remained the differentiator.

The fatherly nudge that started JDPR is easy to romanticize. The more useful inheritance is practical. Do not confuse familiarity with permanence. Do not buy a channel before defining the result. Do not assume a national audience is everywhere at once. And when the campaign ends, bring back a number that means something to the person paying for it.