Callie Grant
Senior storyteller & digital marketer turning “what if” ideas into real-world wins.
Nice to meet you.
I am a digital marketing leader with 15+ years experience blending the art and science of integrated marketing campaigns to build brand and consumer love and loyalty.
Driven by insight.
Guided by experience.
Led by instinct.
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15 Years with Iconic Brands
H-E-B
Sr. Manager & Digital Content Lead
Google Brand Lab
2x Year in Search, Google World Cup, Google Women’s History month, 2x Google Olympics
Google Store
2+ year account lead & Google Home & Pixel Launch
YouTube
YouTube Music pre-launch community
Chevrolet
Small Cars social & activations (ex. SXSW, Street League, Color Run)
AT&T
It Can Wait campaign creative
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Heart for People Leadership
Whether leading an international war room of 30, a creative review of 50+, or individual mentorship, my leadership mantra is simple: there is enough sunshine for everyone. I bring that mindset into every team I lead.
Creating space for diverse perspectives, fostering collaboration across disciplines, and building environments where ideas are heard, results in stronger thinking, more inclusive teams, and award-winning work built together.
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Awards & Proud Moments
Awards
2x Shorty Award Winner
8x Shorty Award Finalist
National AME Awards Winner
In2 Innovation Sabre Awards North America Winner
ADDY Awards (annually recognized including Best in Show)
Proud Moments
Directly managed 2 women of distinction award recipients
Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Woman of the Year Fundraiser raising donations of $40,000+
D1 Women’s Soccer Player & Competition Improv team member
Highlighted Skills
Digital Integrated Marketing
Creative Concepting
People Leadership
YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Meta Display, Audio, CTV Media Strategy
Concepting & Ideation Management
Physical & Digital Activations
Production & Vendor Management
Influencer/Partner Strategy & Execution
Highlighted Work
Real people, real impact.
Local Supplier Spotlights
I saw an opportunity in the thousands of Texas-made products on H-E-B shelves: behind many of them were founder stories rich with passion, adversity, and inspiration that customers would never discover from a package label alone.
The idea was to tell those stories in a digital-first, documentary-style format, moving beyond product marketing to human storytelling. The magic was in applying an editor’s eye to uncover the emotional core of each story, shape a compelling narrative arc, and bring to life not just what these founders made, but why they made it, and the heartbeat behind the business.
From first interview through story development, production, and final edit, this work required a careful hand and deep respect for craft. The goal was to tell the story beyond the label — creating narratives customers could relate to, be inspired by, and connect back to the brand.
Details
Story crafting and executional structure were essential to make this multi-year episodic content something that drove impact and benchmark-breaking watch-times.
Diligence in story curation and excellence in execution created what could have been a simple “support local” message into a high-impact brand interaction representing one of H-E-B’s brand pillars of local. Cuts were designed for YouTube for hero ad spend and cut-down, platform-specific versions for meta.
Series earned multiple Addy award wins and a National Shorty Award Finalist in Storytelling.
The 10%
When approaching a brief, I often anchor thinking in the 70/20/10 model to balance performance with possibility.
70% is built on proven, high-performing workhorses designed to deliver reach and consistency.
20% is dedicated to test-and-learn — pushing ideas forward, refining, and uncovering new opportunities.
10% is reserved for possibility — the space for “what if” thinking and breakthrough ideas.
Not every campaign needs a 10%, but when the right idea aligns with the moment — in culture, timing, and business need, it creates something special: a high-impact, memorable moment of wow.
Some of those ideas wait for the right conditions to come together. But when they do, they have the power to elevate a campaign from effective to unforgettable.
DFW Immersive Dining Experience
When H-E-B announced it was expanding into DFW, it was a huge deal and the perfect moment for an idea I had for years to emerge and make a lasting impression with key members of the DFW community. The idea was to create a fully immersive multi-sensory 7-course meal anchored in storytelling through food and guided by host Chef Scott. Each moment was intentionally crafted to reflect the brand’s commitment to quality, sourcing, and Texas pride and why people call their store “my H-E-B. Each course represented a different core value to H-E-B and the walls, sounds, scent, and of course taste transported diners to the origin of what they were tasting. This turned core values from something we told you about, into something guests could see, taste, and feel building early emotional connection to a brand they only thought they knew.
More than an event, it was a living expression of the brand, transforming awareness into experience and leaving guests with a story they could carry forward.
A Very Texas Holiday with James Van Der Beek
At the advent of livestream shopping on Facebook, we created a playful, culturally-aware holiday moment that blended entertainment, holiday-fuzzies, shoppable content and brand storytelling.
Hosted by James Van Der Beek, we created a Hallmark-inspired shoppable FB & YT livestream to highlight the season’s special Texas traditions. Shoppable streaming was brand new and the Hallmark-movie “just feel happy” content was being devoured across platforms. Hosted by new Texan and target demographic darling JVB, H-E-B leadership and Texas celebrities popped by “his home” to discuss their favorite holiday traditions as JVB read through a custom (written by Callie Grant) version of The Night Before Christmas as he guided Texans through their shoppable, cozy holiday live complete with prizes and Feeding Texas giveback.
Viewers watched an average of 23 minutes, over 525K views across Facebook and YouTube, 2,535hours of watch time (105 days!) and a lift in ad recall (4.1 pt), brand awareness (6.7 pts) and consideration (1.8 pts).
Changing Hearts & Minds for a Major Priority
To Texas, with Love
H-E-B faced a long-standing perception challenge: customers often viewed private label products as lower value than national brands, despite the reality that every H-E-B product is tested to meet or exceed quality standards and thoughtfully developed for Texas tastes. The opportunity was to shift that perception at scale — not product by product, but through a campaign that could create a halo effect across the entire owned brand portfolio.
In exploring the challenge, I connected with members of the product development team and uncovered something powerful: the pride, care, and intention they put into every product felt less like manufacturing and more like gift-giving. The emotion mirrored the feeling of finding the perfect present — something chosen with care, made just right, and meant to bring joy.
That insight became To Texas, with Love — a digital-first, fully integrated campaign designed to reframe H-E-B products as thoughtful, high-quality, and made with Texans in mind. The work put H-E-B employees who touched the product (ex. R&D scientists, package graphic designers, brand managers) at the center, sharing their personal stories behind the products they brought to shelf.
From Creamy Creations Texas Starry Night, inspired by childhood summers under the Texas sky, to holiday traditions brought to life through family recipes, the campaign revealed the human stories behind the products, transforming them from private label into something personal.
The result was a campaign that didn’t just tell customers H-E-B products were special, it showed them, creating emotional connection and shifting perception through authenticity, pride, and story.
TTWL was a critical contributor to H-E-B reaching it’s aggressive own brand share goals within its target timeline and is in its 6th year running with consistent marks well over H-E-B already higher than industry benchmarks. It is regularly used by national YouTube creative sector as the example of best in class marketing for the campaign for both the creative and the sophisticated media strategy comprised of sequential messaging, retargeting, and audience pooling.
Playing with the platform
Pinterest Trend Targeting Adjacencies
Pinterest offers a unique window into not only what people are searching for, but what they’re planning, aspiring to, and seeking inspiration around. I partnered with Pinterest to develop monthly trend reports across key categories, using both search volume and trend velocity as signals for emerging customer interests and cultural momentum.
From there, I saw an opportunity to approach search strategy differently — pairing H-E-B products with adjacent trending topics in ways that felt natural, playful, and unexpected rather than interruptive.
For example, when “fisherman aesthetic” emerge as a trending style, we created playful content connecting the trend to H-E-B’s flavored tuna packs, showing that the brand understood the cultural conversation while introducing the product in a whimsical and delightful pin of surprise.
This required a highly strategic search and audience strategy to balance trend volume and velocity, with broad enough keywords related to a trend that stayed true to the strategic concept. Broad match was not the game, but we needed a wide enough reach to achieve the goal.
Our approach allowed us to break into white-space opportunities where products wouldn’t traditionally appear, while staying connected to timely trends and customer behavior. By listening first, identifying cultural signals, and designing content around the way people naturally engage on the platform, we created marketing that felt like welcomed inspiration.
Influencers, Creators, Ambassadors - oh my.
Extensions of the team, not media placements
I’ve always seen influencer and creator marketing as the space where brands invite friends of the brand to help tell the story. Whether driving awareness, fueling a big brand moment, or building ongoing advocacy, the right partnerships extend community through voices people already trust regardless on where the content lives. Partnerships are a massive resource in telling stories, gaining and providing outside perspectives, authentic endorsement and more with another person showing up in your tribe with a variety of strategic places for the content to live.
Whether a feature on your channel, in paid media, a spot in an activation or on their own channel, authentic relationship is key. Consumers can smell transactional partnerships a mile away, so picking a partnership should be as important as your wedding guestlist.
The strongest partnerships are extensions of the team, not media placements — grounded in real alignment, strong briefs, and integration into the campaign idea from the start. I always evaluate these partnerships for overall match, brand fit, relationship health, talent/use match (ex. do they have on-air talent chops, are they super niche or more broad etc.) risk-analysis, ease of working together and more that is both qualitative and quantitative to help guide me in maintaining a healthy program. In the same as every relationship, I consider the brand in the same way, asking where are we this quarter with our goals, what do we want to do and who is the right match for the business objectives of the time.
My perspective was shaped through work with the Global Influencer Practice Group at FleishmanHillard supporting major campaigns for Google, and later building creator and ambassador programs at H-E-B. From partnerships involving celebrities to pup-fluencers, to renowned photographers and brand partnerships, my belief has stayed the same: when done well, partnerships feel less like promotion and more like trusted participation in a bigger brand story.
Beauty in the Budget
Budget and low-price messaging with heart
As grocery prices continued to rise and SNAP benefits were reduced, many families were looking for ways to put meals on the table without sacrificing pride or joy. This creator-led series focused on showing how real families were finding budget-friendly solutions with H-E-B — meals that met both emotional and financial needs.
Working closely with brand ambassadors, we identified authentic, family-approved recipes that balanced affordability, accessibility, and real-life utility. Each meal was developed in partnership with pricing teams to ensure ingredients remained reliably budget-friendly and widely available across stores.
The storytelling was intentionally simple and relatable, highlighting the beauty in meals that weren’t “5-star,” but “5-smile.” Paired with more direct value messaging, the series added a human layer to budgeting — reframing it not as compromise, but as care, creativity, and pride in providing for your family.
From others…
“I had the privilege of working with Callie Grant for more than 7 years and she is hands down BEST IN CLASS when it comes to storytelling and social media. Callie has the rare ability to find “the nugget” in a story and turn it into something that stops people in their tracks. Callie constantly elevated the work and drove sales time and time again. In my 3+ decades in retail, it was an honor to work with her.”
Jody Hall, Group Senior Vice President Global Sourcing H-E-B
“Callie is a singularly dedicated, creative, whip-smart storyteller who is a genuine pleasure to work with. She is an expert at distilling complicated campaign strategy into fresh, straightforward creative strategy that converts. As a bonus, her leadership style is open, honest and friendly: She guides her team without micro-manager and always explains the why behind decisions. 12/10 would work with her again in a heartbeat.”
Janet Cowan, Senior Copywriter & Creative H-E-B
Excited to meet you.
Let’s connect! 15 minute hellos welcomed & morning tea always encouraged.
