The shoes are a useful place to begin. On her first trip to Cannes Lions in 2026, Jenn DeMartino Callister had a client to support, colleagues to see and a formidable collection of events to navigate. Genius was on the agenda. So were conversations about lyrics, reputation and cultural credibility. Somewhere among the yachts and beach invitations, she had absorbed a practical instruction: bring flats. Public relations may trade in appearances, but feet still have to do the walking.
She had supported clients going to Cannes before, from thousands of miles away. Arriving herself brought the pleasure of seeing familiar names become familiar faces again. Her itinerary included Rob Markman’s planned conversation with Babyface and a week alongside Gillian Sheldon. The account was busy, affectionate and lightly amused by the spectacle. A giant LinkedIn logo on the Carlton Hotel had already supplied its own opening line.
“I also got the flats memo.”
Jenn DeMartino Callister, on her first Cannes Lions visit
The guest list came first
Callister’s career began in Manhattan culture and events publicity, including work for Amy Sacco and Bungalow 8. Born and raised in New York, she worked around artists, designers, galleries and hotels before moving into broader consumer campaigns. Hospitality publicity gave her an early professional setting in which a place, a person and an occasion all needed to make sense together.
In spring 2013, she moved to Los Angeles to build an agency office. Over the following five years, that team grew from three people to more than twenty. She left as an executive vice president and started Hustle&Co. in spring 2018. The transition carried a change in responsibility: she would now be building a business under a name she had chosen.
Entertainment work ran across that change. The 2015 Soul Train Weekend press announcement listed her at DKC Public Relations. By the 2018 BET Awards nominations announcement, her name appeared under Hustle&Co. Those small administrative details make the career transition tangible. A publicist’s own news can be tucked beneath somebody else’s headline, down where journalists look for the person who will answer their questions.
The people who stayed in the story
One of the more revealing accounts of Callister arrives through a colleague’s career. Andy Keown had spent years in corporate and destination communications before moving into agency work in 2016. Describing that adjustment, he named her among the mentors who helped him learn how agencies operated. It is a useful piece of testimony because the subject of the conversation was his development. Her name appeared because he remembered the help.
Keown’s public recommendation adds detail to that picture. He describes a leader who recognizes individual talents, offers sustained guidance and makes work enjoyable. The emphasis falls on what happens inside a team: people being understood, supported and directed toward the client’s goals. Publicity can look like an occupation made entirely of external relationships. His account gives the internal ones their due.
Emily Bender’s route into Hustle&Co. supplies another view. She joined Callister during the pandemic to help build an already growing practice. When the agency unveiled its website in 2022, Bender wrote about the team they had created across the country. The public introduction followed years of work. Even a communications business occasionally needs time to get around to communicating about itself.
Growth also meant bringing in people with specific experience. In 2023, Nathalie Rubin joined as an account supervisor after working at Elektra Entertainment. Reporting to Callister, she would support accounts including Influence Media Partners, Vibee and Spotify programs. A founder’s expanding business can be read through those appointments: the kinds of experience she brings into the room help determine which assignments the team can take on next.
A title with a brief inside it
Founder and CEO identifies Callister’s authority. Chief Narrative Officer, the title used on her agency’s site, identifies the work she wants associated with it. A narrative has to connect an organization’s activities to an audience’s interests. It asks for selection and judgment. A list of everything a company does rarely gives a listener a reason to remember any of it.
Hustle&Co.’s services put that judgment alongside media relations, event publicity, partnerships and strategic counsel. Its portfolio crosses music, entertainment, consumer technology and hospitality. That range asks a publicist to move between the vocabulary of the business and the vocabulary of the people it hopes to reach. A music company might be discussing distribution. A listener may be thinking about the next song.
The 2025 Bandcamp assignment illustrates the practical demands. Hustle&Co. won the US public relations account after a competitive pitch and worked with UK partner DawBell. Bandcamp’s general manager, Dan Melnick, highlighted their understanding of the company’s mission and their coordinated approach. An existing music community comes with relationships already in place. A communications team has to understand those before it can sensibly invite more people in.
Music gives the business a public life
The agency’s music work extends beyond individual performers. In 2023 it supported the announcement of SoundCloud’s licensing agreement with Warner Music Group around Fan-Powered Royalties. It also worked with HeadCount on awareness for voter registration around the 2022 midterms. Google partnerships involving Raedio, Motown Records, Women in Film and the Producers Guild of America added another kind of assignment: communicating programs intended to broaden representation in entertainment.
Later came work for Spotify’s EQUAL, GLOW and Frequency initiatives, and for Vibee’s music experiences, including Zoo Station: A U2:UV Experience. These are different briefs with different constituencies. They place the team around the structures that surround a performance: the platform, the fan gathering, the partnership and the opportunities available to the people making the work.
There was a workplace detail amid the campaign news, too. Hustle&Co. introduced Flexible Fridays, with a two o’clock finish throughout the year. An agency called Hustle&Co. had made an explicit arrangement for stopping early. The name has energy; the calendar has a boundary. Both belong in an account of the business Callister has built.
Four shops and a larger company
For the Oasis Live ’25 reunion, Hustle&Co. handled communications for fan merchandise store launches in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and Chicago. The assignment led to an expanded relationship with Warner Music Experience. It was a specific piece of a much larger cultural event, requiring attention to several cities and to the people who would care about showing up in each one.
Los Angeles · New York · Toronto · Chicago
The agency’s 2026 Next Gen recognition described a period of expansion: its client roster and internal team had doubled in under eight months, while revenue increased by more than 35%. Those figures describe movement within the business, rather than its absolute size. They also came alongside a move further into film and television through American High, the studio led by Jeremy Garelick.
The broader roster continued to change. Work for Bandsintown involved music discovery and platform partnerships. Vibee assignments connected fans to destination experiences. American High added film and streaming work. Callister’s original hospitality and entertainment background remained visible, while the organizations around the audience became more varied. The room had grown to include the companies that help people find, make and experience culture.
A place among the next founders
Professional recognition has followed both Callister and the collective. PRNEWS named her in its Business Entrepreneurs category in 2023 and again in 2025. Hustle&Co. received The PR Net’s Next Gen Lifestyle Agency of the Year recognition in 2023. The distinction between the individual and the organization matters: one acknowledges her role as a founder, while the other belongs to a team’s work.
There is also a teaching setting in her public career. USC Annenberg listed her among presenters at its November 2022 Lead On! Women in Communication Leadership Forum. The event brought communication executives together for conversations, workshops and networking with women considering their own paths into leadership. Attendance was limited to forty people, a scale that left room for the smaller exchanges behind a professional introduction.
For someone whose job involves creating occasions for clients to be heard, appearing in that setting has a particular relevance. Experience becomes useful to the next person when it can be discussed. Keown’s account of her mentoring offers a personal example of that process. The forum supplied a more formal setting for executives to share what they had learned.
When the neighborhood needs a publicist
In 2025, Hustle&Co. joined the LA Strong Comms Coalition, offering free communications support to businesses affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. The agency also worked on the LA Art Show’s thirtieth anniversary, where communications included charity partnerships and recognition for artists affected by the fires. The work placed familiar professional skills in the service of a city finding its footing again.
For a local business trying to regain customers’ attention, visibility is a concrete need. People need to know that it is operating, where to find it and what has changed. Callister spoke about the coalition with pride when marking her agency’s seventh anniversary. The client roster was growing, and she made space in the same account for publicists helping their neighbors.
Her life outside the agency includes another kind of local commitment. She and her husband have fostered and helped find homes for more than two hundred dogs through Love Leo Rescue. Some stayed: Bo, Ruby, Roxy, Sita and Coco appear in her biography. It is a suitably crowded final scene for a career built around introductions. Some relationships lead to another assignment. Some apparently lead to another dog.