Revolutionizing Influencer Marketing Models With Adrian Capobianco of BILI

Adrian Capobianco is the CEO and Co-founder of BILI, a platform designed to revolutionize the influencer and social commerce landscape. With over 20 years of experience as an executive in various advertising agencies, Adrian has a rich background in digital, CRM, and media. His expertise in leveraging data analytics and AI has positioned BILI as a pioneer in guaranteeing brand visibility and sales through influencer content.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:11] BILI’s mission to streamline the brand-influencer relationship
• [06:26] How Adrian Capobianco’s agency experience sparked BILI’s inception
• [08:22] The growing trend of social commerce in Asia and its influence on BILI
• [12:33] How Adrian turned an idea into a thriving platform
• [16:36] BILI’s unique performance-based model for brand partners
• [23:39] Why sports influencers are game-changers for brand promotions
• [29:46] How to build a powerful advisory board for growth
• [37:50] Adrian’s advice on leveraging mentorship for career advancement

In this episode…

Could the integration of commerce and social media be the next big frontier for brands and influencers? With the rapid growth of social commerce, influencers are no longer just content creators; they are evolving into powerful drivers of commerce. As social media platforms around the globe adapt to this trend, how is one company positioning itself at the forefront of this transformation?

Adrian Capobianco of BILI (Because I Love It), is capitalizing on this trend by creating a platform that bridges the gap between brands and influencers, focusing on both content and commerce. Adrian shares how BILI helps influencers monetize their audiences by connecting them with brands in a performance-based model. With a database of over 20,000 social media influencers and 400 million impressions in North America, BILI is uniquely designed to encourage sharing and mutual success. Adrian draws inspiration from trends in Asia, where commerce is more integrated into social platforms, to develop strategic initiatives for North America.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz welcomes Adrian Capobianco, CEO and Co-founder of BILI, to discuss leveraging influencers for social commerce. He delves into how BILI’s platform operates on a performance basis, ensuring brands only pay for results. Adrian discusses the strategic approach to growing their creator community and brand partnerships, emphasizing the significant shift from content to commerce. They also explore the dynamics of influencer marketing, including the rise of influencer-driven sales and the importance of partnerships in expanding brand reach.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Adrian Capobianco on LinkedIn
• BILI
• Pivot hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway
• Scott Galloway on LinkedIn

Special Mentions:

• Howard He on LinkedIn
• Henoc Muamba on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “Negotiation Tactics From FBI Agent Christopher Voss, Founder of Black Swan Ltd” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Make Your Business the Next McDonalds of Your Industry with Michael E. Gerber” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Have Your Business Run Without You with Mike Michalowicz, Author Fix This Next” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “The potential for social commerce is just at the tip of the iceberg, with massive changes on the horizon.”
• “Influencers and creators are shifting from content to commerce, revolutionizing the way we view retail.”
• “Our mission is to help make the connection between brands and social media influencers more efficient and more effective.”
• “By being platform-agnostic, we’re able to accommodate an incredibly diverse range of brands and products.”
• “You can find a creator that can speak in a genuine way to your brand for almost any product or service now.”

Action Steps:

1. Leverage data analytics for strategic decision-making: Brands and influencers can make more informed decisions about partnerships and content strategy to maximize impact.
2. Integrate commerce with social media platforms: Overcome the barrier of separating content creation from the sales process to streamline the consumer journey from discovery to purchase.
3. Develop performance-based partnerships: Ensure mutual benefit and accountability, guarantee a return on investment, and incentivize influencers to create content that resonates with their audience.
4. Expand into emerging markets like esports and “Name, Image, and Likeness”: Tap into growing markets to access diverse audiences and new revenue streams, leveraging their unique influence.
5. Build a diverse advisory board for strategic guidance: Experts from diverse fields can provide valuable insights and guidance for business growth.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Adrian Capobianco of BILI. You can check him out at becauseiloveit.com. 

And before I formally introduce you, Adrian, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out and, you know, some interesting interviews, some of my favorites. I’m curious, you know, over the years, I like to have some of my favorite entrepreneurs, authors like Chris Voss of Never Split the Difference, ex-FBI hostage negotiator. Fantastic episode with that, I had Michael Gerber of The E-myth, Verne Harnish of Scaling Up. He started Entrepreneurs’ Organization. That was a great episode. 

Mike Michalowicz has several books out. So, you know, Profit First. Some of those I don’t know if you have any favorite books, Adrian or resources. Do you have any favorites for you over the years from business perspective?

Adrian Capobianco 01:26

No. You know what? I’m more of a, instead of long form content, I’m more of a kind of audio short form content. So I listen to about a dozen podcasts.

Jeremy Weisz 01:33

Which ones are your favorites in the business realm?

Adrian Capobianco 01:35

I’m kind of into the Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher kind of, they have a bunch of them. They’re good. 

Jeremy Weisz 01:43

He has some good books, too. Scott Galloway has some good books. Yeah.

Adrian Capobianco 01:46

Yeah. They keep the content interesting. They have an interesting kind of personal dynamic that carries through to make the content a bit more interesting, and then just a ton of new sources every morning. You know, my newsfeed at about a 1.3 speed for about, you know, 15, 20, 20 different news stories every morning.

Jeremy Weisz 02:02

I prefer the audio too, because I listen like over two speeds so I can get more stuff done and do whatever I’m doing.

So check those out and more on InspiredInsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. 

How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution behind the scenes. So, Adrian, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create amazing content, amazing relationships, and most importantly, run their business. 

You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and the companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you definitely should. If you have questions, you can go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. 

I am super excited to introduce Adrian Capobianco. He’s CEO and co-founder of BILI. BILI socials becauseiloveit.com and they are designed to help social media influencers and creators connect to, and share and sell their favorite products. Okay. And they have a database of over 20,000 social media influencers in North America. 

They reach over 400 million impressions. Maybe that number is updated by now. This is just what I read, Adrian. And they’re very unique because of their performance-based model. They’re also platform agnostic, and they’re really designed with specific, unique features that encourage sharing and mutual success from a brand side and also the influencer side. Right. So Adrian, thanks for joining me.

Adrian Capobianco 03:58

Thank you. Jeremy. Glad to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 04:00

So just talk for a second. There is a video portion I’m going to pull up becauseiloveit.com but tell people a little bit more about BILI and what you do.

Adrian Capobianco 04:11

Great. Well quite simply I mean our mission is to help make the connection between brands and social media influencers more efficient, more effective. At the end of the day, our, you know, we want to help influencers and creators monetize their audiences and help them connect with brands to be able to do that. So, you know, we’ve seen a change over the last, last number of years in North America. If you take a look at the most macro level, this number is kind of mind boggling. 

But globally, social commerce, which is all transactions and social media last year was about 1.3 trillion. That number is kind of a bit of a head scratcher. That includes ad dollars and social platforms, etc. In this year, it’s estimated that influencers, and influencers and creators, we use that name interchangeably, but they’ll help drive about $100 billion in sales. And while that number is quite large, we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. That number is expected to grow 2 to 3x over the next 12 to 24 months. 

So we’re going to see some massive changes in terms of how influencers and creators not only create content for brands and content for their audiences, but help sell products that they’re interested in, sell products to their services, to their to their audiences. So we’re about to see some massive changes, and really, how we’ve set up this business is to be able to help our brand partners and our creative, creative partners take advantage of these changes over the next few years.

Jeremy Weisz 05:47

You know, I feel like it has been really a rise of influencers like we’ve seen, even if we watch mainstream TV, they’re celebrities now and they’re driving lots of sales and it’s really pretty amazing. 

I’m curious, what gave you the idea to start this company? Because when I look at a dual sided marketplace, I always think this is difficult, right? Because it’s like we have brands, I mean, then we have the influencers. Obviously the influencers help with the traffic stuff, but it’s still not easy. What gave you the idea?

Adrian Capobianco 06:26

So maybe I’ll share a little bit of my background first because that’ll give a bit of context on why we started BILI. My background is former executive or CEO of a number of ad agencies. So I spent about 20 years as CEO or executive in various advertising agencies. If you’re familiar with the advertising space, there’s a number of different areas. I’ve been lucky enough to very, very early on work in digital along the way in the CRM, like the customer relationship management, the data side, the creative side, or the content creative as well as the media side. And you know, that agency experience, you know, for 20 years of work with influencers, creators, social content creators to, you know, for brands to be able to leverage that. And the change that we’re about to see is from influencers and creators as content to commerce. 

So really, the inspiration for the business, and we’ve seen this trend already play out in Asia, and we could maybe talk about that as a separate track, but the inspiration of the idea for the business was really to help brands and help influencers kind of cross this bridge from content creators to democratize many retailers selling products and services and leveraging a lot of that agency background, agency experience to build up our community, build up our platform, build up our partnerships. There’s a bit of a longer answer on kind of the two sided marketplace, and we can touch on that in a little bit. But the actual core of the idea came up with my business partner and I, Howard. 

And, you know, Howard and I have known each other for 20 years and, you know, as friends and business partners and a number of capacities and, you know, really talking about the opportunity inspired from trends we’ve seen in Asia to enable influencers and creators in North America to be much more focused on the commerce side of what they do in social media. Does that make sense, Jeremy?

Jeremy Weisz 08:22

Yeah. What were you seeing as the trend in Asia? I was watching some interview. I think the background was the New York Stock Exchange or something. You know what I’m talking about. And I don’t know if that’s, is that Howard? It was Howard with you at the time? 

Adrian Capobianco 08:37

That wasn’t. That was another gentleman, but, yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 08:41

Okay. I’m curious what you see as the trend in Asia. And I love this conversation because it’s always interesting, I always see, okay, there’s a trend somewhere else, and when they bring it to us, it blows up. Like if we take I don’t know, I always think of coconut water, right? Like it’s normal in Brazil and then some American was over there was like, hey, we should bring this over to the US. Why aren’t we doing this in the US? And brings that trend over. Well, what are you seeing in Asia?

Adrian Capobianco 09:08

So the trend in Asia on this kind of back up a few years ago is much more to this commerce side. Right? So almost, you know, almost exclusively in North America in the last few years, it’s much more been about influencers, creators creating content and sharing that on Instagram, sharing that on TikTok, sharing that on X, Threads, etc.. 

What’s happened in the major difference in Asia is that commerce has been built into the platforms, right? So the ability to transact is much more integrated right within the platforms. Right within WeChat, right within Alipay, etc. And that’s a very big difference that allows dollars to change. So you know, the trend that is already a few years back is the actual transactions, much more transactions integrated within the social platforms, which we haven’t yet seen at scale in North America. But we will very soon. 

So, you know, from a business perspective, for some of our investor partners, for example, what they’re pretty interested in is the trends they’ve seen. It’s almost like being able to kind of back up the clock and invest three, 4 or 5 years earlier in Asia but to do it in North America, because these commerce trends are now going to be applied to North America. 

As an example, I saw a chart that we spent a quite a bit of time in Asia over the last year with our business partners, our investor partners. And we’re in an interesting meeting just a couple of weeks ago in China, and they were sharing a chart. And the chart showed that this was up to the end of last year. So this was at the end of Into 2023, and the chart at the very top line showed traditional e-commerce. And as you’d expect, you’d see traditional e-commerce growing, growing, growing. 

And then about 18 months ago, taper and last year actually drop off. And this is in GMP gross margin value like the actual dollars transacted. At the bottom of this, you see a line coming up and that’s Douyin, which is TikTok in China, as you’d expect. You see that kind of growing. And the interesting thing is TikTok and, you know, commerce going on there, TikTok Shop, etc. get a lot of attention. So as I was saying, you see kind of this traditional e-commerce, right, tapering off and dropping a little bit, you see Douyin, which is, you know, which is TikTok scaling up. But it was a line that was double that and that was peer to peer commerce inside of WeChat. 

So it’s essentially like imagine, you know, within, you know, within chat groups, right. The actual transaction amongst individuals. These are groups no bigger than 500 people and the dollars transacting peer to peer. It’s like almost, you know, it’s almost like having WhatsApp groups and selling, being an influencer within WhatsApp. That number was double Douyin, which blew me away the peer-to-peer commerce. 

So not only, you know, some of the trends we’re seeing are not only increasing dollars inside of like the major social platforms, but in peer to peer and smaller groups. And we’re going to see this open up in North America over the next 12 to 24 months.

Jeremy Weisz 12:11

So you have this idea, you see the trends that are going, what do you do first? Do you decide to raise money? What’s the original idea? Because when I look at BILI, it seems like a robust platform. You know, you can’t wave a wand and that just appears out of nowhere. What was the first iteration?

Adrian Capobianco 12:33

Well, I mean, for anyone who’s kind of built businesses, growing businesses, I know this is a bit me personally, but I do love kind of the, you know, idea to kind of take an idea and, you know, a vision and then creating it. But really it was, you know, creating that initial vision with my business partner Howard around the opportunity for, you know, social content and social commerce. So, you know, the step one was really kind of creating that vision that we thought was interesting, differentiated. 

The first step then really is kind of testing that, right. Testing that with folks who we trust kind of saying, hey, we have an idea here. Is this crazy? Is it crazy enough? Does it make sense? You think there’s an opportunity? And speaking to folks who, you know, a number of different folks from a number of different areas whose opinion we trust, who will, you know, also challenge us a little bit. 

So kind of develop that strategy, test that strategy. And then, you know, we found that with the folks who tested the strategy, it seemed to hold water. Seemed to be interesting. And then it’s you gotta put that together, right. There’s a bunch of different building blocks. Part of that was the fundraising. Part of that was the platform. Part of that was the community. You know, those are kind of three big areas that we focused on. 

You know, you know, from once the strategy was kind of baked. It was really kind of how do we how do we either, you know, fund this ourselves or raise how do we build the platform, and then how do we build the community. And I spent a lot of effort doing all three of those, and then a number of tangents behind those over the last year and a bit.

Jeremy Weisz 14:13

From the platform perspective. Adrian, I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years on the platform. What are some things that you and the team have implemented inside the platform because of the feedback you were getting? Maybe from the brands or maybe from the influencers?

Adrian Capobianco 14:32

Oh man. There’s well, let me think. There’s a ton there’s a ton of content or a ton of features. Right. And you know what you’re showing here on screen is, you know, is essentially kind of our marketing site. We also have a platform where creators come to come to and they build,

I think the biggest, you know, the biggest very early on we wanted to focus on on the social commerce side. So, you know, I’ve kind of used the term social commerce and social content. Right. The social commerce side we call BILI Base, the social content side we call BILI Boost. 

The market’s still catching up in North America to the commerce side. So we’ve leaned more on BILI Boost over the last while. But, you know, at the end of the day, there’s a there’s a whole bunch of different things that we build into the platform and really what we’re, you know, what we’re looking to do now and kind of our next iteration, which will come over the next, you know, the next couple of months is a what I’ll call a reinvigoration of BILI Base. You know, right now in the platform we have, you know, maybe over 100 brands, a couple thousand products. As I said, we spent a lot of time in Asia last while. 

We want to be able to connect into Asian manufacturers and brands. We want access to North America so that we have thousands of brands and manufacturers and, you know, hundreds of thousands of products in there to give creators and influencers a, you know, an amazing breadth of products and services that they can offer to their fans and audiences.

[Continue to Page 2]