Ali Grant once ordered vehicles for an on-site activation and overlooked a small specification: they had manual transmissions. Nobody knew how to drive them. It is a useful detail to keep in mind when considering the apparently effortless world of influencer marketing. Someone has to arrange the transport. Someone has to read the invoice. Occasionally, someone has to find a person who can operate the clutch.
Grant has described her early working life as a rotation through accounting, payroll and cleaning, alongside the job she had actually set out to do. She founded Be Social in 2012, building a business around the growing connection between brands and online personalities. Today she is co-founder, co-CEO and chief marketing officer of The Digital Dept., the agency formed from Be Social and Socialyte. The distance between those two jobs can be measured in acquisitions and organizational charts. It can also be measured in how much one person learns to hand over.
Her career offers a ground-level view of an industry that learned to call people “talent” while still asking them to answer an extraordinary number of emails. Grant saw commercial promise in those relationships early. Building a company around them required a second education, one with fewer lectures and rather more invoices.
A news anchor changes her assignment
Before the agency, there was the school morning broadcast. Grant took it seriously. She liked writing and storytelling and imagined a future in television news. Her childhood included San Francisco and New York before her family settled in San Diego, where she spent most of her growing-up years. The beach city remained a place she spoke about affectionately later, even as her working life became associated with Los Angeles.
She studied journalism at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Public relations classes redirected her attention toward helping brands tell their stories. Internships gave her a way to test which parts of the work interested her. That practical approach became advice she passed on: try different agencies and brands, learn from people with experience, and discover your preferences by doing the work.
Her early professional experience included both traditional public relations and a social media agency. Between those worlds she identified room for a business focused on influencer outreach and collaboration. Starting it meant learning the mechanics of employment as well as selling the idea. Hiring her first employee was an early challenge, with legal and management questions attached. A promising service still needed to become a functioning employer.
The people on the other end of the email
By 2014, Grant was explaining how representing brands had led her toward representing creators. Be Social arranged publicity, launches, events and social campaigns. Matching clients with bloggers made another need visible: the bloggers themselves had businesses to run. The agency added a division managing bloggers, YouTubers and social media personalities. The introduction had become an ongoing relationship.
One connection began when Grant saw Jordan Younger featured by Lauryn Evarts of The Skinny Confidential. Grant had already followed Younger’s work. Seeing the interview reminded her of its potential, and she reached out. There was a blog, an app and an upcoming book to think about. A creator’s business was already spreading well beyond the borders of an Instagram square.
Her account of an ordinary day at the time was dominated by coffee, calls, meetings and a formidable inbox. She also remembered an attempt with Younger to secure a suitable Instagram photograph: strangers recruited, a crowd gathered, traffic interrupted. The pictures went unused. Even the people paid to understand the platform could put considerable effort into a photograph that never became a post.
A brand needed an introduction.
A creator needed someone to manage what followed.
First, make room. Then, let go.
The original premises were domestic. Asked about her first office, Grant answered, “You mean my house? Ha!” At one stage the bootstrapped business occupied garage space. By 2019, Be Social had moved into ROW DTLA, the Los Angeles complex where old industrial buildings had become workplaces for contemporary businesses. The change in surroundings made the company’s growth unusually visible.
Grant helped shape the new office with an interior designer and her executive team. She wanted a relaxed, feminine space where people could work comfortably and be creative. The process involved many decisions and plenty of back-and-forth. For a communications agency, the office was also a physical expression of the business: a place that clients and staff could walk into, rather than an adjective in a pitch deck.
She was also learning to be more selective. Looking back in 2021, Grant described accepting too much work early on and having to reconsider how she built the company. Her advice became decidedly operational: understand accounting and human resources, hire specialists for specialist work, seek a mentor, and think about where the company should eventually go. There is little glamour in employment practices. There is considerable inconvenience in getting them wrong.
The manual-transmission mishap belongs to that education. Grant has treated mistakes as something a team must be allowed to make and learn from. She credited her late grandmother Patricia with lessons in confidence and business sense. The founder’s job gradually acquired a different emphasis: choosing people, listening to their knowledge, and giving them enough room to use it.
“Get out of your own way.”
Ali Grant’s recurring personal motto
The sale that kept her at the desk
In August 2020, Dolphin Entertainment acquired Be Social. Grant remained CEO, and the agency continued under its existing name from Los Angeles. The buyer’s announcement named H&M, Nordstrom and Disney among brands Be Social had worked with. It also recorded the company’s inclusion among Inc.’s fastest-growing businesses in 2017 and 2018. The eight-year-old agency had become part of a wider entertainment marketing group.
That group included 42West, The Door and Shore Fire Media. The arrangement gave influencer marketing a place alongside businesses serving film, hospitality and music. Grant’s company brought relationships with digital creators into that collection. A founder who had once managed the books herself was now working inside a public company’s network, while continuing to run the operation she had built.
A second acquisition changed the possibilities again. Dolphin bought Socialyte in 2022. Its president, Sarah Boyd, had founded SIMPLY and already knew Grant through the industry; Grant had spoken at one of Boyd’s conferences. The two discussed combining their companies at a Dolphin CEO summit in Miami. About six months later, the new business had a name.
Sharing the title, dividing the work
The Digital Dept. arrived in September 2023. Be Social’s events, product mailers and earned-media experience joined Socialyte’s brand strategy, campaign planning and paid-media capabilities. Both companies had talent management operations. Combining them offered a way to put related services closer together, with fewer handoffs between separate businesses.
Grant and Boyd became co-CEOs with distinct responsibilities. Grant also took the CMO role, overseeing marketing and talent management. Boyd became CRO, concentrating on brand partnerships, new business and strategic opportunities. Grant has described the arrangement as a chance to spend more time on the work she particularly enjoys: promoting the business and building relationships with talent. Sharing the top title made a division of attention possible.
Grant’s ambitions after the merger included exploring athlete influencers and younger creators, while expanding events and BRANDEdit showrooms. Her advice about the competitive side of talent management was to regard other managers and agencies as potential collaborators. In a relatively small professional community, people repeatedly cross paths. Boyd’s earlier invitation to speak at a conference had become part of the history of a shared company.
What the camera leaves out
Grant has pushed back against the assumption that influencing is easy. The creators she describes put time, money and sustained effort into businesses whose finished products may look casual. As content shifted from polished feeds toward video and more spontaneous presentation, the work behind it remained. Appearing unrehearsed can itself demand preparation. A viewer sees the post; a manager sees the commitments around it.
Her interest in Substack fits that broader view of a creator’s working life. In September 2024, The Digital Dept. devoted a post to her enthusiasm for the publishing platform. Newsletters offered creators another place to build a community, publish different formats and earn through subscriptions or commercial relationships. The journalism student’s route through social media had brought her back to the possibilities of publishing.
In January 2025, the agency added an affiliate marketing and creator services division led by Kate Steele. Its work addressed a practical limit: creators might want to develop affiliate income but lack the hours to manage links, content and performance analysis. The service extended from strategy into execution. Grant’s early discovery, that people on the receiving end of brand outreach needed help running a business, had acquired another application.
Affiliate-attributed gross retail sales reported by The Digital Dept. for its new division’s first quarter. Retail sales are distinct from agency revenue.
In June 2026, Grant appeared on Influencer Confidential to discuss getting signed, building a creator business, brand negotiations and usage-based pricing. These are questions of terms and judgment, with consequences that extend beyond a single upload. The technology keeps changing; the conversations still require someone to understand what each party is agreeing to.
There is a pleasing continuity in that. The school broadcaster wanted to tell people what was happening. The agency founder wanted to help other people get heard. The executive now works on the arrangements that let those people keep going. Somewhere between a first introduction and a signed agreement sits the work Grant chose to make her business. It rewards a feel for people, a willingness to learn, and an occasional close inspection of the vehicle booking.