A talent manager’s contract is an odd place to look for a character sketch. Yet Melanie Kentish has put a good deal of herself into what she wants hers to leave out. The founder of Dopamine Studios has made freedom from restrictive management terms part of her pitch to creators. If someone stays, she wants the relationship to have earned it. A contract can arrange a great many things. Affection is generally beyond its powers.
That proposition gives Kentish’s career a useful organising question: who gets to decide what happens next? She has occupied several seats around the creator economy’s table. She tried making content herself. She worked on the brand side at Sky. She led the talent business Gleam Futures. Then, in 2023, she started a company where the decisions would come back to her.
At Dopamine, her remit joins talent management with creator marketing and the development of intellectual property. The ambition is to help people build something that survives beyond a run of sponsored posts. A feed is a place to meet an audience. It can be a rather temperamental place to keep an entire career.
A small following, a useful education
Kentish’s involvement in social media reaches back to 2006. Her early work included organising technology events, bringing people from the developing platform world together at conferences. Alongside that work, she experimented with her own blog and YouTube presence. A small following gave her a view of the business from the person expected to keep producing the next thing.
When Engine Group approached her in 2011, she moved towards devising strategies that connected brands and creators. She had discovered that she preferred the work behind the camera. That is a useful discovery in an industry whose most visible rewards tend to accrue to whoever is standing in front of it. There are other ways to participate in a performance besides becoming the performer.
The experience also gave her a reason to question a familiar commissioning habit: handing a creator a set of words and expecting the audience to hear its usual voice. Her later advice repeatedly returns to creative freedom. The person who built the relationship with the audience needs room to interpret the message. Otherwise, the brand has hired a voice and promptly asked it to stop sounding like itself.
The scale of a television screen
At Sky, Kentish established and grew an influencer team and developed an ambassador programme of around 200 creators, intended to bring the broadcaster to audiences under 35. Her responsibilities covered entertainment, cinema, children’s programming, sport, VIP and products. That range required more than finding people who liked the same television show. It required understanding how different communities might encounter the same brand.
The launch of Sky Glass supplied a conspicuous example of scale. More than 200 creators produced over 3,000 pieces of content. Those figures describe the volume of the campaign, rather than its commercial return. They do, however, suggest the amount of coordination involved. Behind a crowded social feed sits a less glamorous population of briefs, schedules and approvals.
More than 3,000 pieces of content - a campaign-volume measure, not a sales or return-on-investment figure.
Kentish has been willing to revisit that work critically, questioning the intrusiveness of such a concentrated campaign. It is a revealing detail. People who build something conspicuous are rarely short of invitations to repeat it. Being able to reconsider the experience is useful when your next job asks you to see the same business from another seat.
The company she wanted to run
In October 2022, she became managing partner of Gleam Futures. The agency had helped establish the commercial possibilities of Britain’s early digital creators, with a history running through names such as Zoe Sugg and Tanya Burr. Its work extended into publishing, licensing and other forms of intellectual property. Kentish arrived at a business where an online audience could become the beginning of a much wider professional life.
Her time there was brief. She left in July 2023 and announced Dopamine Studios the following month. The announcement set out the sort of company she intended to run, including commitments to innovation, the success of its talent and fair dealing. It also included respect for competitors. In an industry built around attention, promising to behave well towards the people competing for it is a fairly pointed choice.
“We will always be fair.
Melanie Kentish, announcing Dopamine Studios, 2023
We will always be curious.”
The public proposition was explicit about avoiding unfair restrictions on creators. That puts a recurring obligation on the agency: it must remain useful. Getting someone a deal is one form of usefulness. Helping them work out which opportunities belong in their future is another. The second requires a different conversation, with room for an answer that will not fit neatly into this month’s campaign report.
Her professional biography describes a focus on helping creators develop brands, businesses and intellectual property beyond social platforms. The distinction matters because the audience, the platform and the creator have different interests. A platform wants activity. A brand wants a result. A person might want a career that leaves room to change. Management has to make those ambitions coexist without assuming they are interchangeable.
An invitation into television
ITV Insiders offered a way to apply that experience at a broadcaster again. Launched on 29 April 2024, the programme brought together more than 100 UK creators across interests, demographic groups and regions. ITV credited its partnership with Kentish at Dopamine on the ambassador initiative. The arrangement included previews, access to experiences, paid campaigns and a Creators’ Summit.
The summit took place at ITV’s White City headquarters. Speakers included commissioners, producers, programme personalities and representatives from social platforms. Monique Anderson at It’s Rated By produced and curated the event. The detail matters: this was a network of people doing different jobs, with Kentish’s role in the ambassador strategy forming one part of the wider undertaking.
For creators, the programme offered access to television’s working world as well as its finished programmes. For ITV, it provided relationships with people whose audiences might encounter entertainment through a phone before finding it on a television screen. Kentish had already worked on that meeting point at Sky. Her own company now gave her another way to organise it.
The speech after the award
Recognition has followed two different chapters of her work. In October 2023, Kentish won bCreator’s Serious Influence award, an individual category recognising an impact on the creator economy or influencer marketing. In October 2025, Dopamine Studios won the organisation’s Boutique Talent Management Agency award. A personal award had been followed by one bearing the company’s name.
Her response to the agency win returned to working arrangements. In a public post accompanying her acceptance speech, she called on management businesses to give creators more freedom, and on brands and agencies to pay them on time and use contracts that protect everyone. It was a practical set of requests for an occasion that would have accommodated a perfectly respectable thank-you and a photograph.
The distinction between recognition and everyday service remains important. An award records a judgement at a particular moment. A management relationship continues through the less photogenic business of correspondence, planning and negotiation. Kentish’s emphasis on timely payment puts some welcome weight on those ordinary mechanics. A creator can appreciate a celebration and still need an invoice settled.
Her public acknowledgements offer another view of the relationships around the business. For International Women’s Day in 2024, she thanked women who had helped her career, naming colleagues and creators together. The list included Lucy Billington, Kat Farmer, Ruth Crilly and Paula Sutton. Sutton replied that she was proud to be represented by Dopamine. The exchange brought the professional network down to the scale of individual people.
There is a pleasing lack of tidiness to such a list. Careers rarely arrive through a single introduction or one decisive act of encouragement. Kentish’s thank-you made room for many contributions, spread across different jobs and stages. It also placed her own story among the people she works with, rather than leaving the founder alone at the centre of the picture.
Her work continues to span representation and commissioning. In 2026, Dopamine’s Code of Silence campaign appeared on the ITV bCreator shortlist for Lifestyle Creator Marketing Campaign of the Year. Kentish also serves on the bCreator committee. Those roles keep her close to both the work being made and the industry’s discussions about what deserves recognition.
There is a consistent ambition running through the different jobs: giving a creator more say over the shape of a working life. It connects her early experience making content with her present interest in careers beyond a platform. The audience matters. The commercial relationship matters. So does the person who will have to live with the decisions after the campaign has finished.
That brings the story back to the contract. Kentish chose to make fair terms part of her company’s public identity. The promise remains easy to understand and demanding to fulfil: do enough useful work, pay attention to the person, and give them reasons to keep choosing the relationship. There is considerably more work in that than in acquiring a signature.