James Grant joins Disney’s corporate strategy team

From the I-5 to the boardroom. James Grant, who once made the drive to Anaheim as a wide-eyed child, has joined the corporate strategy team at The Walt Disney Company in New York. The boy who loved the brands now gets to help shape the business behind them.

Grant announced the move on LinkedIn, saying he has admired the business throughout his career and is “excited and grateful” to be part of it. The hire is a notable one. His CV reads like a tour of the forces reshaping media: streaming, programmatic advertising, sports rights and big-ticket dealmaking.

Start with his most recent act. In 2026 Grant was a vice-president at The Trade Desk, the ad-buying platform, before moving to Disney. Before that came his biggest build. As founder and general manager of Universal Ads at Comcast from 2024 to 2025, he created and led the company’s video ad platform, a programmatic tool that lets businesses of any size plan, run and measure video campaigns. He took it from concept to revenue and customer adoption, with full profit-and-loss ownership of a fast-growing unit.

The details matter. He recruited and led a team spanning product, engineering, sales, product marketing, revenue operations, finance and legal. He negotiated supply partnerships with more than 20 leading publishers, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Fox and Roku. He also developed an ecosystem of more than 15 API partnerships, bringing measurement, creative generation and other advanced ad capabilities into the product. By his own account, he drove transformation inside a Fortune 500 company, no small feat given its cultural, organisational and commercial complexity.

Disney will also gain a strategist with a long record. Grant spent five years and one month at Comcast, including four as vice-president of corporate strategy from 2020 to 2024. There he led thinking on growth initiatives across Comcast-NBCUniversal’s portfolio, including Peacock, Xumo and international expansion. He delivered a reorganisation of TV and streaming units to cut costs and improve efficiency in NBCUniversal’s media division. He advised on sports rights and programming strategy, including an evaluation of Comcast’s portfolio of NBC-owned and Xfinity-distributed regional sports networks. He led business development on joint ventures and acquisitions across advertising technology, international parks and streaming, social media and gaming.

He also created three new ventures: NBC Sports Athlete Direct, a Meta and NBCUniversal metaverse partnership, and Universal Ads. He was promoted twice, serving as executive director from 2020 to 2021 and associate vice-president from 2021 to 2022.

Earlier, Grant was a partner in the technology, media and telecommunications practice at Boston Consulting Group from 2013 to 2020. He led a 15-person team that transformed a legacy broadcaster, saving nine figures in costs while improving operations. He ran due diligence for private-equity and strategic buyers, advised on the separation of a media conglomerate with assets in local television, newspapers and digital media, and defined a small-business sales strategy for a major social media platform. He also supported growth strategies for leaders in direct-to-consumer streaming, media measurement, music and live events, video distribution, and financial data. His career began at Creative Artists Agency from 2009 to 2011, supporting the incubation of new businesses including Funny or Die, WhoSay and AXS TV.

The upshot is a rare mix: consultant, operator, dealmaker and founder. For Disney, that is a useful set of skills to add. For Grant, it is a homecoming of sorts, to brands he has loved since childhood.