The Video Shop That Kept Learning New Tricks

In 1989, a video-production company opened in Harrisburg with a name that sounded like a place you might send a rocket. The other JPL, the famous one, looked toward Mars. This JPL pointed its cameras at people. It made corporate films. It edited stories. And then it committed the useful heresy of every durable service business: it stopped confusing the tool with the job.

The company added interactive work in 1995, web development in 2002, custom learning through d'Vinci Interactive in 2013 and enrollment marketing through Paskill in 2017. Today JPL describes itself as a full-service marketing and communications agency. The phrase is usually corporate wallpaper. Here it has a surprisingly literal meaning. JPL will research an audience, position a brand, build its website, make its videos, buy its media, stage its annual meeting and measure the room.

The first deliverable is a diagnosis

Consider four clients whose trouble arrived wearing the wrong name tag. Trex was selling plenty of decking, but employee retention was constraining production. Quest Diagnostics was known to doctors, hospitals and insurers, yet needed a direct relationship with consumers who were taking more control of their health. Commonwealth Charter Academy needed enrollment, but first had to puncture old assumptions about online school. WITF and LNP needed to announce a complicated combination, then keep two workforces from feeling that the news had happened to them.

None of these was simply an advertising problem. JPL built an employer brand for Trex, used data to identify promising consumer segments for Quest, researched current and prospective parents for CCA, and gave WITF/LNP a synchronized launch followed by a 150-day internal-communications plan. The medium came after the obstacle.

“A clever idea isn't enough. What we create has to work for your business and your audience.”JPL's operating principle

That sentence explains the firm's position in the market better than a services menu. JPL competes with large integrated agencies, regional independents and a crowd of specialists. Its wager is that a client would rather have the researcher, writer, designer, developer, media buyer and event producer argue around one table than translate the same problem between six vendors.

Twenty-one parents, carefully unscripted

The cleanest example is Soccer Shots, the children's soccer program. For its twentieth anniversary, the brand wanted awareness and registrations for National Free Fun Day. JPL recruited 21 parent influencers across 21 North American markets, from nano-creators to larger accounts. Each received campaign messages and brand rules. Each was also encouraged to use an authentic voice.

That last choice matters. Influencer work tends to fail first at the exact moment the creator begins sounding like legal copy. JPL's creators made more than 120 pieces of organic Instagram content. The campaign generated nearly 850,000 organic impressions and more than 16,000 interactions. More tellingly, nearly 30 percent of microsite visitors from influencers clicked through to a local franchise site. Attention continued into intent.

A collection of adjacent crafts

JPL organizes its work around problems rather than a single prized channel. Brand and audience intelligence establishes what matters. Storytelling and content give the idea a voice. Digital experience turns it into a useful place. Acquisition work finds the audience. Employee communications carries strategy inside the company. Events make it physical. Paskill supplies depth in higher education; it says its team has worked with more than 600 institutions. d'Vinci Interactive handles custom learning and training.

The event practice makes the integrated claim tangible. HuddleArea is JPL's branded virtual-event platform. LEAP is an analytics system that reads anonymized emotional response in real time without recording video. The firm also rents production studios and 3,900 square feet of meeting space at its Harrisburg headquarters. Strategy can proceed all the way to microphones, lighting cues and the uncomfortable minute before a chief executive walks onstage.

The trick is sequence, not scale

There is a method here that smaller teams can borrow without buying the entire agency. Start by naming the behavior that is stuck. Research the humans around it. Pick the smallest combination of channels that can change that behavior. Give real participants enough freedom to sound like themselves. Then measure the next action, not merely the first glance.

This approach has limits. Integrated work depends on shared goals, access to customer or employee insight and a client willing to connect departments that may guard their own budgets. If leadership wants a predetermined deliverable, will not expose the underlying data or cannot agree on what success means, the extra disciplines become expensive decoration. The model earns its keep when the problem crosses boundaries.

JPL itself is evidence of the same sequence. Its first medium did not disappear. Video remains part of the work. The company simply kept asking what had to happen before the camera rolled and after the viewer watched. That question pulled it upstream into research and strategy, then downstream into websites, media, learning, events and measurement.

The result is an 85-plus-person agency with teams in Harrisburg, Philadelphia and New York, led by CEO and President Luke Kempski, Chief Growth Officer Kelly Seipe and Chief Technology Officer Ryan Pudloski. Kempski joined as a video producer in the founding year. Seipe and Pudloski became equity partners in 2025. The firm has also appeared on Pennsylvania's Best Places to Work list for 24 consecutive years - a useful statistic for a company whose product changes whenever attention does.

JPL's work is primarily for organizations with layered audiences and complex journeys: consumer brands, healthcare companies, colleges, B2B firms, employers, public agencies and event teams. Public project prices are not listed; engagements are scoped around the assignment.