In 2008, when the American economy was busy turning respectable business plans into kindling, David Wingard started a one-person design studio in Jacksonville. The official company history is admirably free of mythology. New clients called. He kept answering. Other people joined. “He” became “we.” It is the kind of origin story that sounds almost too plain until you notice the choice buried inside it: Wingard did not begin by inventing a market. It began by paying attention to the market already on the telephone.
Eighteen years later, the name sits above a full-service marketing and communications agency. Brand strategists work near designers; public-relations people near web developers; media planners near social and video specialists. The agency sells the usual modern bundle - identity, campaigns, ads, websites, PR, SEO, content, media and activations - but the bundle is not the interesting part. Plenty of agencies have a long menu. Wingard’s differentiator is that the menu comes with a map of Jacksonville drawn from memory.
The city is not a backdrop
Consider the problem of advertising Jacksonville as a destination. Florida already has globally legible shorthand: theme parks, pastel nightlife, retirement, beaches. Jacksonville has beaches too, but borrowed shorthand would make it look like a substitute for someplace else. Wingard went looking for the local contradiction. The agency’s own case study compares the city to a boiled peanut: a secret recipe, an unexpected delight and a reason to stop rather than pass through.
That observation became “The Flip Side of Florida,” a Visit Jacksonville campaign full of bright color, local oddity and lines such as “No theme parks, but the beaches are wild.” The work did not attempt to fix Jacksonville’s lack of a tidy national cliché. It used the lack as the idea.
From March 2023 to March 2024, Wingard reported that Visit Jacksonville’s total website traffic grew 200 percent. The case study also lists 48,882 partner referrals, 47 percent of traffic coming from paid media, a 1,175 percent increase in net followers and more than 431,000 emails sent at a 32 percent open rate. Those figures belong to one reported campaign window, not a controlled experiment. Still, they reveal how the agency thinks: the clever line is the beginning of the work, and the dashboard is where the argument ends.
Integration is the product
A client can hire Wingard to rename a company, redesign its identity, build its WordPress site, write the copy, plan the media, pitch the local press, manage the social response and report what happened. E-commerce work extends to WooCommerce and Shopify; lead-generation pages to HubSpot. The agency says it has built more than 500 websites since 2008. Its web process begins with three user personas and empathy maps, moves through custom design and development, and includes 90 days of minor changes and bug fixes after launch.
The practical benefit is fewer handoffs between firms with different incentives. A new identity can inform the website while the PR team shapes the launch and the media team watches response. Wingard describes clients as partners and itself as an extension of their teams. That phrasing is agency boilerplate until the work requires regional media relationships, permitting, vendors, neighborhood credibility and somebody who knows which local reference will feel affectionate rather than manufactured. Then proximity starts behaving like infrastructure.
“They do a great job with customer relations.”
A verified Regency Centers client review
What the relationship costs
Wingard does not publish a rate card. Public marketplace data offers boundaries rather than a quote: a $5,000 minimum project and a listed hourly rate of $100 to $149. One verified advertising engagement for Regency Centers was placed in the $200,000 to $999,999 range and described as ongoing from July 2020. The same review reported an immediate increase in site visits and HubSpot lead generation after the campaign began. Wingard created a Google Data Studio dashboard so the client could inspect digital advertising performance by metric and filter.
Marketplace-listed minimum project and hourly range. One verified engagement was reported between $200,000 and $999,999. Scope, channels and duration determine the real number.
The review is useful because it is not perfect. The client rated Wingard four stars, praised the relationship and said follow-up could sometimes improve. Their advice to future buyers was simpler than any procurement framework: decide your key performance indicators before hiring the agency. That is the copyable part. Agree on the outcome, give the work a visible scoreboard, and make reporting accessible between meetings.
Even the local expert loses locally
The clean agency profile usually contains wins arranged in flattering chronology. Public records are less obedient. In 2024, the Jacksonville Aviation Authority evaluated four firms for a marketing-consultant contract worth up to $750,000. Wingard finished second with 81.67 points. St. John and Partners scored 95.89 and received the recommendation.
That loss matters because it places a sensible limit around the local-knowledge story. Familiarity is not a moat. It does not guarantee the strongest proposal, the best specialist credentials or the highest evaluation score. Nor does an integrated agency automatically beat a focused shop when a client needs only one discipline. Wingard’s model works when the problem crosses channels and local context changes the answer. It is less decisive when the buyer wants a narrow commodity, a proprietary technology or instant coverage in markets where the agency has no relationship advantage.
Where the model has leverage
The lesson worth stealing
Wingard’s evolution suggests a modest growth strategy. Start with the work customers already request. Add adjacent capability when coordination itself becomes painful. Keep the parts close enough that strategy survives contact with production. Then turn accumulated context into a product competitors cannot download.
The company’s leadership structure makes the evolution visible. David Wingard remains founder and chief creative officer. Russell Baker, who brought experience from Coca-Cola, became chief executive officer and brand strategist in 2019. Natalie DeYoung leads communications and PR; Adam Berry leads digital and web. Around them is an in-house roster across accounts, design, development, search, social, PR, operations and media. The founder did not need to remain the whole agency for the founding sensibility to remain useful.
What changed Wingard’s mind about being a one-person studio was not a manifesto. It was demand. The phone kept ringing, the briefs grew wider, and “he” became “we.” What keeps the expanded version coherent is a sharper idea: realized potential for partners, community and people. In practice, that has meant websites for institutions, PR for an immersive Van Gogh exhibition, a refreshed identity for a 60-year-old mechanical contractor and tourism advertising that lets Jacksonville be peculiar in public.
There is a temptation in marketing to confuse distance with ambition. Wingard offers the more interesting possibility that depth can travel. Know a place closely. Learn how its companies sell, how its reporters listen, how its residents roll their eyes, and which details outsiders might love. Package that knowledge with enough executional range to carry an idea from a sentence to a street sign to a search result. The agency can serve clients elsewhere, but the Jacksonville map is still folded in its pocket.