The trouble with public policy is that it arrives wearing sensible shoes. It comes as a report, a hearing memo, a PDF with a chart on page 47. The ideas may affect millions of people, billions of dollars, or the temperature of the planet. Yet the packaging seems almost designed to make the eye wander. NJI saw a business in that mismatch.
The Washington-based agency takes the material of government relations - evidence, regulation, advocacy, reputation - and gives it the treatment normally reserved for products people actively want. Film. Animation. Live experiences. Interactive data. Websites that behave like websites instead of filing cabinets. Paid media aimed not at everybody, but at the comparatively tiny group of people who can move a decision.
That sounds obvious after someone says it. In 2007, it was a peculiar proposition. Co-founders Nathan Imperiale and Josh Shultz had spent years around Capitol Hill and helped establish early digital communications operations serving the House of Representatives. Their useful discovery was not that policy people needed the internet. It was that policy expertise and creative expertise rarely shared a desk.
The narrow door was the right door
Most agencies introduce themselves by listing what they can make. NJI is more interesting when described by what it can translate. A multinational company wants lawmakers in several countries to understand its local economic footprint. A nonprofit wants the public to grasp how habitat loss relates to disease. A trade association needs a roomful of employees to become credible advocates. In each case, the raw material is complicated, the audience is busy, and a generic brand campaign would miss the point.
NJI sells the translation layer. Its in-house offer spans audience research, content strategy, branding, writing, web development, film, animation, data visualization, events, augmented reality, virtual reality, and paid distribution. Clients include Meta, The Home Depot, Intuit, World Wildlife Fund, PhRMA, Airlines for America, the United Nations, UL Standards & Engagement, and the State of Qatar. They are not united by industry. They are united by having something consequential and difficult to explain.
“Speed without intention is just noise.”Josh Shultz, co-founder and co-CEO
The agency model is conventional in one respect: NJI is privately held and earns fees through projects and continuing client relationships. No public rate card reveals what a campaign costs. The less conventional part is organizational. Strategy and production sit together. That matters when a policy changes at 10 a.m. and the campaign must change before lunch. A chain of separate consultancies, studios, developers, and media buyers turns every revision into a relay race. NJI wants one team holding the baton.
The evidence is hiding in the outcomes
Consider NJI's work with World Wildlife Fund. The assignment was to explain conservation's relationship to future pandemics and provoke action. Scientific material became an interactive narrative with animation and data visualization. The result exceeded WWF's fundraising goal by more than 150 percent, generated over 11,500 donations, and earned more than one million social impressions. The important number is not the impression count. It is the conversion from a difficult idea into a voluntary act.
For Meta, the revealing number is volume: more than 3,000 pieces of policy collateral, over 30 websites, and at least 10 event activations in a relationship dating to 2019. That is not one viral trick. It is a production system capable of adapting a global brand to specific markets, regulations, audiences, accessibility standards, and moments.
For Qatar, scale looked different. A nation-branding campaign profiled people across art, food, and sport, localized the work for markets including Britain, France, Spain, and South Korea, and placed it from social feeds to Piccadilly Circus. NJI reports more than 749 million impressions, a 425 percent increase in digital-ad clicks, and an 81.32 percent video completion rate. Later, an anime-inspired campaign for the charity football event Match for Hope paired famous players and creators with Japanese-style animation. It raised $10.5 million for education and recorded more than 25 million views.
The visual leap was not decoration. Anime already belonged to the younger audience NJI wanted to reach. The style carried the message farther because it began with the audience's taste, not the institution's comfort.
A useful machine for difficult messages
There is a repeatable sequence here, and it is available to teams without a global agency budget. First, name the person whose action matters. “The public” is not a person. A congressional staffer, store manager, donor, standards engineer, or football fan is. Second, reduce the message to the smallest honest unit. Third, choose the format that person already knows how to consume. Only then should anyone open the design file.
A field guide to making complexity travel
NJI's 2025 expansion into policy-focused paid media sharpens the idea. The agency argues that broad reach and vanity metrics waste money when the real audience is a finite set of legislators, staffers, agency leaders, advisers, and political media. Its method combines first-party data, tailored creative, repeated exposure, and a mix of social, web, and connected television. A Direct Supply campaign, NJI says, helped protect $44 billion in critical senior-living and healthcare funding. The point is not that every ad caused an outcome. It is that the media plan began with the outcome rather than backing into it from cheap impressions.
The human bet inside the AI bet
NJI now operates with a public presence in Washington, London, Singapore, and Doha. Its 60-plus-person team is small beside a holding company and large enough to keep specialized craft under one roof. The agency says 60 percent of the team are women, describes itself as LGBTQ+ founded and owned, and participates in Virginia's veteran-employer program. Its culture language is conspicuously un-corporate: leaders become “The Magician,” “The Beekeeper,” or “The Rubik's Cube”; a Pixel Panda serves as Chief Panda Officer; pets are welcome on calls.
The whimsy sits next to a serious operating choice. Imperiale and Shultz have remained co-CEOs from the beginning. They credit trust, frank communication, complementary strengths, careful hiring, and work interesting enough to retain good people. Expansion followed the specialty rather than replacing it: policy fluency developed in Washington proved scarce in London and Singapore too.
In April 2026, the company launched NJI Studio, combining brand, film, digital, and live experience in one practice led by Kara Mask and Ryan Raybould. Its position on artificial intelligence is neither romantic refusal nor automatic enthusiasm. Use the tools to compress timelines and expand capacity, NJI says, but keep judgment human and accountability singular. That is a sensible posture for an agency whose product is not merely content. Its product is confidence that the content means what it says.
Public affairs will always contain reports, committees, and page 47. NJI's wager is that seriousness does not require dullness - and that the people making consequential decisions are still people, susceptible to clarity, surprise, rhythm, and a well-lit stage. After nineteen years, the wager looks less peculiar. The sensible shoes can stay. Someone merely needed to teach them to dance.
Go a little further
See the agency's work, its current thinking, and the founders discussing how a policy-specialist shop became an international one.