In September 2007, Steven R. Jolly was in San Diego with Dallas on his mind. He had gone to a national gathering of LGBTQ journalists representing the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. Among the other Dallas attendees were reporters Ian McCann and Sergio Chapa. Jolly, the owner of SRJ Marketing Communications, had a different assignment: give people a reason to pay attention to the city he had brought with him.
It was the third year his company had represented the bureau at the convention. Jolly described the gathering as an opportunity to put Dallas's LGBTQ community before national and international journalists. One reaction he relayed was particularly pleasing: “Dallas seems to be everywhere these days.” For someone working in public relations, that is a useful sort of souvenir. It takes up very little room in a suitcase.
The episode offers a way into Jolly's career. His subject was a particular place; his audience was somewhere else; his job was to close the distance between what people knew and what there was to know. Much of his subsequent advice returns to that distance. An organization can be busy, capable, and familiar to its own staff while remaining surprisingly indistinct to everyone outside the building.
A different tie, a familiar assignment: showing up. An older photograph published on the agency's website.
A business built around the whole message
Jolly founded SRJ in 1989. Based in Dallas, the agency combines strategy, design, and technology, with work spanning advertising, public relations, printed materials, video, websites, and training. The initials on the business are his own. The range of services suggests the problem he chose to take on: organizations rarely meet their audiences through a single, conveniently isolated channel.
His professional focus became communications for rural hospitals. That specialty put local identity at the center of the work. The point of a campaign was to reach a particular community, rather than collect attention from people who happened to live everywhere else. His biography also describes conference presentations, nonprofit board service, and the chairing of marketing committees. Consulting, in that account, extends into rooms where people have to learn to do the work themselves.
By 1995, Jolly was leading the agency into website development for a South Texas hospital. A website introduced another place where an organization could make a first impression. His career has continued across changes in the available media, while the underlying assignment has stayed recognizable: decide what needs saying, find the people who need to hear it, and make the different pieces agree.
- 1989Jolly founds SRJ
- 1995The agency develops a South Texas hospital website
- 2007Representing Dallas in San Diego
A global network, a local address
One of SRJ's essays asks how to think locally in a global medium. It begins with a practical mismatch: social platforms can reach enormous audiences, while a local organization may need to reach only the people within its own area. The size of the network does not settle the question of whom a message should reach. A large audience can still be the wrong audience.
The recommendations are deliberately ordinary. Put location information in profiles. Use local place names. Set geographic boundaries for paid campaigns. Look at the accounts of nearby businesses, institutions, and community groups, and find ways to participate in their conversations. These are tasks someone can actually put on a list and finish.
There is a social understanding underneath the instructions. A place becomes legible through the people and organizations already active there. Paying attention to them gives an institution a way to join in. The internet may have removed the cost of speaking across great distances; Jolly's professional territory still includes the much shorter journey into a neighbor's attention.
The copy has to earn its place
In his December 2019 essay on copywriting, Jolly starts with purpose. What should a reader think or do? The question comes before the wording. He then asks for a central message simple enough to fit into a sentence, an understanding of the intended audience, an opening that earns attention, and language that gets to the point.
His audience exercise is unusually concrete: imagine a person, give that person a name, and consider the life behind the decision. Even in a brief piece about advertising technique, the reader is allowed an existence beyond being a target. Copy should meet that person's concerns rather than make them work out why a business has interrupted their day.
“Don't waste their time with empty words,” he writes. It is advice with consequences for the writer's vanity. An elegant extra paragraph may be enjoying itself more than the reader is. Jolly's list makes the message answerable to its purpose. The hook has a job, the details have a job, and the audience owes the copywriter nothing for having filled a page.
“Don't waste their time with empty words.”Steven R. Jolly · on copywriting, 2019
The filing cabinet gets a speaking part
By December 2022, Jolly was writing about an apparently less glamorous tool: a marketing library. His interest was duplicated effort. If useful material already exists, a team should be able to find it, adapt it, and improve it. The library becomes a way of keeping earlier work available to the next person who needs it.
The details are wonderfully unceremonious. Keep a master guide. Give files meaningful names. Organize reusable material by subject or purpose. Maintain a brand guide that records visual and verbal choices. Write passages that can stand on their own, and flag the details that must change before publication. An old date left in a new announcement is a small administrative error with a very public audience.
Reuse, in his telling, still requires judgment. Each outing offers an opportunity to refine the language. There is a founder's practicality in that argument: earlier effort should make later work easier. A well-kept folder will rarely receive applause. It can, however, spare an entire team the experience of writing the same paragraph for the fifth time.
A visual interpretation of his 2022 advice on reusable copy.
Attention requires someone on duty
That concern with maintenance also runs through SRJ's guidance on social media. The agency urges organizations to assign responsibility, create a posting schedule, and respond to questions. A page needs evidence that someone is present. Sharing relevant material can help sustain that presence without requiring a completely new production for every update.
Its website advice is similarly attentive to the person at the other end. Mobile pages should have readable paragraphs, useful ordering, clear photographs, and buttons people can press. Put important information early. The suggestions concern the small frictions that separate a message being published from a message being received. A button may be beautifully colored and still be too small for a thumb.
The same pattern appears in SRJ's search guidance. List what the organization offers, consider the language people might use to look for it, and include the places it serves. Give a subject its own focused content, then monitor how people arrive. Search becomes a continuing editorial task: compare the intended path with the actual one and revise accordingly.
In a separate strategy essay, the agency sets out a recurring review: evaluate previous work, choose priorities, improve execution, connect the pieces, and build relationships. That sequence gives the communications program a memory. A team can retain the lessons of an unsuccessful effort instead of discovering them afresh with a different typeface and a new invoice.
A teacher with somewhere to go
Jolly's public professional life includes teaching as well as directing an agency. His LinkedIn profile records a video project with Affinity Pictures beginning in May 2013. It also lists Washington State University for 1976 to 1980. The later record is full of attempts to explain communications work: articles, presentations, coaching, and training.
The people around that work supply another view of him. Former colleague Justin Compton credits Jolly's mentoring with helping his own career. Jolly has, in turn, publicly recommended Chris Kinsman, identifying him as a former creative director at the agency. Those connections put names beside the broad idea of leadership. A business is also a place where people learn something from one another and eventually carry it elsewhere.
His holiday writing gives that teaching a warmer register. In December 2022, he encouraged organizations to let staff members deliver seasonal greetings in their own voices, connect with local traditions, and acknowledge community events. A greeting gains something when the audience can attach it to an actual person. The institutional signature can make room for a face.
SRJ's current offering includes a 2026/27 masterclass webinar series, alongside consulting and other marketing services. Jolly also offers in-person teaching and writes, “I love traveling the highways of rural America.” The line gives his otherwise businesslike account a sense of movement: a Dallas-based founder whose work continues to point him toward smaller places.
The services also allow different levels of involvement. Some clients can ask the agency to manage a program; others can seek advice for their own staff or help producing individual materials. That arrangement fits the teaching side of Jolly's work. The person hiring a consultant may also be the person who needs a method to use after the conversation ends. A finished piece and a more capable team can both be useful outcomes.
Return to San Diego in 2007 and the shape of the work is already visible. Jolly had taken a local story to a roomful of people who could carry it further. Years later, his practical writing concerns the same handoff, whether the carrier is a journalist, a staff member, a search result, or a carefully saved paragraph. The tools keep changing. There is still a place to describe, an audience to understand, and a message that needs to arrive intact.