The company was called Everywhere. The camper was called My Cherry Pie. Between those two names sits a reasonably good account of Danica Kombol’s changing priorities: years spent helping brands find their audiences, followed by the freedom to point a small red trailer toward somewhere she wanted to be.
In December 2020, MWWPR announced that it had acquired Everywhere Agency, the Atlanta business Kombol founded in 2009. She left after eleven years. A founder’s biography could finish there, with the sale providing a tidy final paragraph. Kombol supplied a less tidy continuation. There was travel to do, a camper to learn to tow, and eventually more marketing work, with a different set of conditions attached.
Her personal website now puts pie baking and travel near the front of the introduction. Consulting comes with a stated preference for choosing her schedule. The ambition remains, but she has given it more than one place to live. To understand how she arrived at that arrangement, it helps to go back to a different neighborhood altogether.
A television education in attention
Kombol began her career at Sesame Workshop, working on international versions of Sesame Street. Her television background also includes Square One TV, the children’s mathematics program. Before there were brands trying to win an Instagram audience, there were children who needed a reason to keep watching a lesson.
She later moved into comedy, working on short films for Saturday Night Live and with Lorne Michaels’s production properties. Her credits and professional biographies also place her at Kids in the Hall and VH1. These were different kinds of audiences, with different expectations. A mathematical idea and a comedy sketch each had to earn their time on screen.
Then her husband’s CNN job brought the family to Atlanta. With two children at that point, Kombol needed work that made sense in the city where they were living. The particular production opportunities she had known in New York were harder to find there at the time. Marketing became a practical next step. Her subsequent agency experience included Ketchum and Babbitt & Reiman.
The move is a useful correction to the polished career story in which every job appears to have been selected for its place in a future biography. Geography and family economics had a vote. Kombol’s work changed because her circumstances changed, and she found something in the new work that she liked.
The audience had learned to answer back
After Barack Obama’s 2008 election, Kombol noticed clients asking their public relations agency for the online techniques they associated with the campaign. Demand was arriving faster than the agency’s social media staffing could accommodate. She recognized an opening and founded Everywhere the following year.
Her description of the medium was pleasingly free of machinery: “This is just people talking to people online.” For someone who enjoyed conversation, it was an inviting business to enter. The technology mattered, but the recognizable human behavior gave her a way into it.
Everywhere connected brands with bloggers and creators. Its clients included Macy’s, Carter’s, Cox and Newell Brands. Kombol also established Everywhere Society, a network intended to supply those relationships. By 2019, the agency reported a curated community of more than 5,500 micro-influencers. A business built around individual voices had acquired considerable organizational work behind the scenes.
Micro-influencers in Everywhere Society, as reported by the agency that March.
People, relationships and a great deal of coordination.The matching mattered. A creator who already cared about a product offered a different starting point from someone handed an unfamiliar item and a script. Everywhere’s proposition depended on understanding those affinities well enough to arrange a credible partnership. Scale made the selection work more important, rather than making it disappear.
The business of keeping a promise
Kombol’s enthusiasm for the human side of the work came with an insistence on measurement. In a podcast conversation, she explained that campaigns could be assessed against outcomes such as sales, awareness, attendance and website visits. A friendly recommendation still had to answer a client’s question about what happened afterward.
Her daily working world had its own less glamorous measurements: messages, email and the demands on her attention. She kept Chris Bailey’s Hyperfocus near her desk and described using it to reconsider distractions. There is some comedy in a social media executive having to defend her concentration from the very abundance of communication that sustains her business.
As the industry grew, she also helped launch the Influencer Marketing Association. Its agenda included standards, measurement and ethics. In 2019, the organization brought together practitioners from agencies and brands to address questions that commercial growth had made harder to leave informal.
The association’s concerns were concrete: how to find appropriate creators, evaluate results and handle disclosure. Kombol spoke against bots, engagement manipulation and fraud. A market that sold access to trusted voices needed a way to distinguish those voices from a convincing-looking set of numbers.
Her speaking calendar reflected that work. In August 2019 she appeared on a Federal Trade Commission business workshop panel in Atlanta. Later that year, she joined Mediavine’s Jenny Guy to discuss influencer marketing and the association’s role. The subjects included the everyday questions creators face when paid work becomes part of their publishing.
Recognition arrived alongside the institution building. The Atlanta chapter of the American Marketing Association named Kombol its 2019 Marketer of the Year. The previous year, the Atlanta Business Chronicle had included her among its Women Who Mean Business. The award-winning founder had come a considerable distance from finding a new occupation after a family move.
Eleven years, then an exit
By the time Everywhere joined MWWPR, the buyer was acquiring a team, clients and an established creator network. Kelly Dye moved into a vice president of influencer role at MWWPR. Kombol departed. An agency can continue through its people and relationships even as its founder begins making other plans.
She had wanted a buyer that could offer clients a wider range of communications services and fit the culture she had built. The search included attention to the agency’s human relationships. A sale changes the working lives of employees and clients as well as the life of the person signing the agreement.
“Selling your company is rarely an overnight experience.”
Danica Kombol, on the Everywhere sale
Kombol described working with advisers well ahead of the transaction to clarify her goals, introduce incentives for key employees and prepare the business. The eventual announcement was one date in a longer process. For a founder, deciding how to leave can require as much thought as deciding to begin.
In November 2024, the buyer, by then called MikeWorldWide, launched a new social-first agency under the Everywhere name. The name had another chapter inside the larger organization. Kombol’s own public introduction had moved on to consulting, speaking and a life with more travel in it.
A smaller room, a wider map
Her first long camper journey supplied an immediate education in being a beginner. In 2021, she and her husband traveled from Atlanta to Seattle with a trailer despite having very little previous RV experience. A vintage-style GulfStream had caught her eye; a salesperson’s suggestion to think of something red she liked helped turn its color into a name.
The result was My Cherry Pie. The journey took more than three months, and the lessons were practical. Fellow owners in Facebook groups became useful guides to the vehicle’s peculiarities. The marketer who had built a business around people sharing experience was now a customer for exactly that sort of knowledge.
New York offered another exercise in making space. Kombol recalled an early Soho home rented from playwright Richard Foreman, whose proposed monthly rent fell from $1,200 to $800 during their conversation. Decades later, she wrote about arranging a studio with a main room measuring sixteen feet by twelve.
In the smaller apartment, a table served several purposes and folding chairs made dinner guests possible. Furniture had to earn its floor space. These are domestic details, but they give the post-agency story a welcome sense of proportion. A person who has managed a company can also spend time working out where to put the shoes.
Her current consulting identity, Smart Outsider, offers help with strategy, difficult projects, team gaps and public speaking. She also shares her services through Chameleon Collective. She has described that arrangement as a way to work independently while having access to colleagues with complementary expertise.
There is a civic life alongside the commercial one. Her professional biography describes board service with the National Black Arts Festival, past board work with the Atlanta Women’s Foundation and fundraising for Covenant House Georgia’s Executive Sleepout. Atlanta remains a place to contribute, as well as the city where she built her agency.
The travel writing continues. In March 2026 she published a Paris restaurant account shaped by friends’ recommendations. In June, she wrote about exploring Ireland’s Burren with her husband. The destinations change; the interest in people who know something worth sharing remains easy to recognize.
On her personal site, Kombol says this working chapter comes with no intention to scale or sell. That is a precise ambition for someone who has already done both. She can take on a useful project, make another journey and write about what happened. Everywhere has its future. She has somewhere else to go.