Jeremy Weisz 16:01
You know, I’m looking here, as you can see, we’re on the brand section. What sticks out to me, Adrian, is this performance based, okay. If I’m a brand, I love to hear those words. So. But it means I mean, I don’t know what the downside is for it. Maybe the influencers, you know, only get paid when they sell something, but it’s a win win for both. Talk about some of the decisions there around the performance piece.
Adrian Capobianco 16:36
Yeah. So performance hits in two areas right. So let’s distinguish again kind of the BILI Base and the BILI Boost. So on the BILI Base side, if you’re a brand you know, you’re small and medium brand. Let’s say you have a company, we make these earbuds right. We can put these earbuds into the BILI platform. If you and I sell these earbuds at retail, they sell for 100 bucks. You and I, as a manufacturer, as a brand, you know, we’re probably getting about $40 – $45 of that 100 on the BILI platform. You put in the BILI platform and we decide how much we want to pay creators on that.
Most brands will offer a commission of between 15 and 25% to creators. And then the BILI platform, we charge 9%. That means, as a manufacturer of these earbuds, we’re now netting somewhere between 65 to 75% of that dollar versus 40 to 45. Now we also need to ship direct to consumer 1:1. But the economics become pretty interesting. So as a brand, you know, who has you know, these earbuds, you and I, we don’t need to pay to get access to the BILI platform. And we only pay when creators sell, so that is truly a pure performance basis. That’s the BILI Base side.
On the BILI Boost side, it’s more about content, right? So, you know, on the content side, it’s more kind of typically an agency, like an ad agency type content. So let’s say you and I again, we’re this earbud company and we want to create awareness of our new earbuds that we’ve launched. We want to work with influencers because those are amazing channels. So you know, the brand would say, okay, there’s a budget of X dollars. And our team would put together a proposal for that brand, and that proposal would say, okay, we’re going to find ten creators who are very well qualified. This is a data driven analysis, very well qualified and aligned with, you know, the earbud brand company.
So those ten creators over four weeks will create between 20 to 30 pieces of the content. And as BILI, we have enough data analytics and experience behind that that we will guarantee to that brand. The actual number of views that that content will garner on Instagram and TikTok. So that’s a bit of a, there’s a lot of analysis that goes behind that. But because the way we use AI, because of our very close connection with our creator community, because of how closely we we work with creators and a lot of the like I said, the data that we have behind that, you know, we’re able to say at the end of the day for that program for, you know, our earbud company, we will generate 20 million views against your target audience on Instagram and TikTok. And we will guarantee that.
What that does for our brand partners is it removes some of the perceived risk of, okay, well, if I do this with influencers, what will it do? Right? What will the outcome be? What will I get from it?
And we’re able to say, we guarantee that the content that we create will be seen by, like I said, it’ll be 10 million. 20 million, whatever the number is, views of that content for this program, for the budget, you invest in it. As far as I’ve seen, we haven’t seen any peers going that far in terms of guaranteeing the performance. Some will estimate and provide, you know, benchmarks. We’ll guarantee it for brand partners. So I’d like to say we’re the only folks who are doing that. To be honest, I’m probably not right, but I haven’t seen folks who are going that far. So does that make sense, Jeremy?
Jeremy Weisz 20:02
Yeah, from a brand perspective, obviously not all brands can join the platform and have the influencers promote their products. How do you vet the brands?
Adrian Capobianco 20:16
So interesting. So in terms of the brand side on the BILI Base side, as long as a, you know, a brand is selling a product that’s legal to sell online across North America, those products can go into the platform. You know, our team helps brands upload the products, get them into the platform. So as long as it’s a product, it’s legal to sell, it can get on the platform, no problem. The question often is on the other side of that, and the question is, well, you know, is it the right creators for that brand?
So quite honestly, most of our auditing and vetting is on the creator side of the equation, much more so than on the brand side of the equation. So on that BILI Base side, you touched on this, but right now and even our site needs to be updated. You know, but right now, you know, in North America, there’s an estimated 3 to 4 million creators or influencers. We can audit any influencer across North America. Our team, we have about 150 to 200 points of data that we audit on any creator influencer.
Often we have more data on an influencer’s audience than they do. We know, you know, age skews gender, location. This is on aggregate for their followers, right? Location. ethnicity, interest, all that type of data.
So we analyze all of that data, and we can analyze any of the few million creators across North America. On top of that, we’ve actually, we’ve also one of the things that we’ve built up, and we spent a lot of time building this, and we can talk about how we’ve done this, but we’ve built up a community of creators. It’s about 25,000 strong right now. So we have a community of creators in North America, tens of thousands of creators, that allows us to activate very quickly for our brand partners.
So on the BILI Base side, right where brand puts the products in the platform and offers a commission to sell those products, brands often aren’t so interested in assessing the creative. They just look at a creator as almost a sales person, right? As an extension to their sales efforts.
On the BILI Boost side, where creators are developing specific content, brands very much care about this. And what we do is, you know, we will do full analysis on creators to make sure it’s the best creator partner for a brand that we’re working with. Does that make sense?
Jeremy Weisz 22:32
Yeah. Do you find and do influencer agencies use your platform at all?
Adrian Capobianco 22:39
I’m sorry.
Jeremy Weisz 22:40
Do influencer agent like agencies out there that are just trying to do this very manually? Do they ever use your platform just for their clients? Do you find?
Adrian Capobianco 22:51
They may. We’ll work with various agency partners. And you know, either enable them or support them, you know, kind of behind the scenes or, you know, out front with clients. So we do collaborate. You know, we work either directly with brands or with agency partners.
You know, for us, you know, our mission of making that connection more efficient and more effective is equally lived up to whether we’re working with, you know, agency partners or brand partners.
Jeremy Weisz 23:20
When I was researching your company, I immediately thought of NIL and sports has got to be big. Talk about that market for a second. And you can see here there’s a page obviously about sports. But talk about that as a market for you.
Adrian Capobianco 23:39
Yeah. So specifically for NIL. If folks aren’t familiar, NIL stands for name, image and likeness. Right. And over the last couple of years that’s significantly changed so that amateur athletes can now benefit directly, i.e. earn directly from their own name, image and likeness before they become professional.
So that’s been a bit of a sea change in the sports world over, over the last couple of years. A very, very interesting one. One of our strengths, one of our, you know, very, you know, very strong capabilities is we are one of the leaders in North America of having an athlete creator community. So I’ll build on that a little bit right now, you know, the on aggregate we have access to, you know, we give our brands direct access to almost 14,000 amateur, pro and retired athletes across North America. And the reason we do this, or the way we’re able to do this, is with some strategic partnerships.
Actually, I’ll give you an example of one of those strategic partnerships. And maybe, you know, for your audience this is a bit of a sneak peek because we haven’t we haven’t formally announced this. But yeah, right now we’re, you know, we have a partnership with the NHL Alumni Association. So what the NHL alumni does is they endorse us to, you know, every former NHL player. This now gets us access to thousands of former pro hockey players across North America.
We have the same partnership structure with the Canadian Football League with their alumni, sorry, with their CFL, PA, the players association with their union. So we’ve done these deals with sports organizations. And really, the reason these deals make sense from their sense, from their perspective, is we help the athletes earn beyond their field or rink of play, right. You know, athletes are great. You know, on the rink, on the field, on the field of play. We help them earn beyond that by bringing them revenue opportunities. So it makes sense for, you know, the CFL Football Union to work with us to help their players earn beyond.
And what that means to brand partners, like, you know, a brand that wants to get access to athletes is we provide very direct and very efficient access to amateur pro and retired athletes. So it’s a very, very interesting space.
The misconception is often it’s, you know, very expensive and too hard. So a lot of the attention and this is indicative of influencers overall, a lot of the attention goes to, you know, the few percent of the few percent, right? So, you know, the top athletes who are the best in the world, who are the most noticeable. But there’s the whole base below that which can connect with an audience in a very genuine way, who are very eager to work with brand partners, who can create great content, who connect and can speak in a, like you said, in a genuine way about brand products or services. So we’re able to provide direct access to potentially, you know, thousands of athletes across North America.
So there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there, and we’re going to continue to build on that. Like I said, we’re one of the leaders in connecting brands with amateur, pro and retired athletes across North America. But we’re kind of just getting started. And the next big wave of athletes that we’re going to connect brands to is in the gaming side, esports Sports E-gaming. So we’ll take our community of 14,000 amateur pro retired athletes, and we’ll probably grow that 4 to 5 X over the next year with gamers and esports.
Jeremy Weisz 27:35
I want to talk about one of the examples, I know you have an advisory board, and there’s an example of someone on an advisory board who obviously uses the platform. But before we get into that, talk about how do you decide what type of people or position that you want on your advisory board?
Adrian Capobianco 27:54
Good question. So the type of folks we do, we have an amazing advisory board., the folks kind of share it on LinkedIn and that sort of stuff. Really honored to have some amazing people who are aligned and supporting what we’re building. And it’s really that, you know, they have a view to helping us build.
You know, all our advisors are also investors in the business too. So they believe in the business and kind of vested in our mutual success. To answer your question, you know, we’re looking for people who are additive to what, you know, our own capabilities have of myself and Howard. We’re looking to people who are interested in helping grow the business. So they’re aligned and they’re, you know, they’re mutually incented to, you know, at the most strategic level as owners in the business, as part owners in the business to grow it.
And we’re looking, you know, our advisors are not it’s not tactical and execution. You know our advisors help us with strategic initiatives. So with each of our dozen advisors, we have 1 or 2 specific strategic initiatives that they support us with. And they help do that. And we’re very lucky and honored to have some amazing folks who if you think about kind of the space we’re in, you know, we have textbook tech folks from X, you know, X, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Google X, Walmart X Financial Services, Global CPG CEOs, pro athletes, very tech oriented people, investment and finance oriented people.
If you take a look at our advisory group, you know, from a diversity of experience, you kind of get a sense that they cut a bunch of different areas. And that’s amazingly valuable to us as we grow the business.
Jeremy Weisz 29:46
So I mentioned one of the sports advisors, can you talk about how they use the platform?
Adrian Capobianco 29:54
Yeah. So gentlemen, Henoc Muamba, pro athletes have a, you know, a career of about 2 to 3 years in North America. He’s distinguished in that. He has a, you know, 12 year pro football, NFL and CFL career. Just retired retired last year.
Henoc has been on our advisory board for almost two years now and has been instrumental in helping us develop some of these strategic partnerships we have in the sports space. In addition to being, you know, a very accomplished athlete, you know, he’s only one of two people to ever get MVP and MVP in the same season, championship winner. But he’s also, you know, very well spoken, very articulate. You know, he has a very curious and entrepreneurial based mind. So yeah you know he’s amazing that he has great credibility in the sports space. You know, but also very helpful and supportive of us on the business side as well.
And you know, Henoc’s not only one of our advisors, but he’s also a creator that has participated in programs for our brand partners. So, yeah, he’s great because he can speak very credibly to kind of the business side, but also as an athlete creator that’s worked with our brand partners.
Jeremy Weisz 31:11
How has he used the platform?
Adrian Capobianco 31:14
So I’ll give you an example of a program. There’s a global sports streaming service. And this is very obvious there’s a global sports streaming service that wanted to promote the fact that, you know, in a region they had access to every single NFL game. So our pro athletes are obviously, you know, very critical and very kind of very aligned with this. So our proposal to that sports streaming client was well, you know, instead of just having anybody talk about the platform, why don’t we have pro athletes who live and play the game, talk about how they live and love the game and love your service to watch the game they love, right?
It’s not only the, you know, the players in the game, but also fans of the game. So Henoc was well, although he’s not a quarterback, he was a quarterback of that program. So Henoc was the lead in that program. And he pulled together four other pro athletes. And basically they made a team of content creators that over the course of eight weeks created probably about 50 pieces of content that were shared on Instagram and TikTok. Generated millions and millions of views across that content. And, you know, basically, at the end of the day, helped drive subscriptions for this streaming client.
So, you know, while our advisor, he was the creator talent. And he held together the program every week, did content with the other players, and they produced and shared this content and all the players earned from this program talking about what they love to do anyways every day, which is play the game of football.
Jeremy Weisz 32:55
What type of brands are a good fit, Adrian? I was looking through I mean there’s a I mean I’m that’s a streaming service. What are some other examples of types of brands?
Adrian Capobianco 33:05
Yeah, we’ve worked with brands, streaming, consumer packaged goods, auto, home tech fashion apparel. The amount of content out there right now in social is so diverse that, you know, we can pretty much find a crater for anything. And I’ll put a little caveat on that. Where it gets a bit hard is if we’re talking about a B2B, a business to business product, right. If it’s a very niche kind of, it’s a B2B product in traditional social media, TikTok, Instagram, etc., that’s sometimes a bit tough to fit.
If we’re working within LinkedIn, that’s much easier. But if you’re a business to business product, using social creators maybe isn’t isn’t the best fit. If you’re a very regulated industry, pharma depending on the financial, you know, financial services side, maybe not the best fit unless you’re talking about financial services education, for example, which could be a great thing. But yeah, so very regulated or very B2B or sometimes a bit harder outside of that. You know, we’ve had challenges.
We’ve had briefs to get creators to show up in a small town of 1500 people. And, you know, if we can get two creators to show up in a town of 1500 people, I think we can pretty much find a creator for anything. And so, yeah, it is, you know, the beauty of the diversity of content that’s out there and the diversity of creators and niches and finding the right people is you can pretty much find a creator that can speak in a genuine way to your brand for almost any product or service now.
Jeremy Weisz 34:45
Now, I love this, the conversation in general about influencers, because I feel like there’s just so much leverage in this from a brand, from an influencer perspective, because they have this inborn audience, they share it and it helps both parties, and it’s probably less expensive from a customer or client acquisition side like you were saying too.
I know as a CEO founder, you’re always thinking about growth. And you know, you’re like, yeah, I have like 15, 20 different growth initiatives. Can you talk about a few of your growth initiatives so people can kind of get inside your mind?
Adrian Capobianco 35:27
Yeah. Well, let’s back that up to what you said kind of previously, right. It’s in some sense we’re in the middle of a triangle here. Right. And that triangle is brands creators and consumers or audiences. Right. So we need to accelerate across all three of those.
So on the brand side, we continue to accelerate how we’re reaching out and growing with our partnerships there to bring on new brand partners. On the creator side, we continue to grow our creator community. Like I said, right now, our community is about 25,000 and tens of thousands. And, you know, you know, by the end of the year, that’ll probably be, you know, 100,000 plus. So to continue to grow that. We also want to continue to grow the breadth of products so that we’re, you know, working with international partners to get access to global distributors and global partners who want to get access to the US and Canada through our network of creators.
So we’re, you know, we have strategic initiatives to accelerate on all three of those: growing our brand partnerships, growing our community of creators, and growing our value proposition for social shoppers and for audiences. And at the end of all of these, I mean, behind all of these, you kind of touched it already. And it’s something we’re quite proud of. But always continue to try to drive forward is: how do we bundle that all up? How do we put a bow around that with, you know, a performance based perspective to make sure we are always delivering and over delivering on value for our partners.
And, you know, we don’t say no, we don’t say clients. We say brand partners. We don’t say, you know, creators and influencers. We say our creator partners because they’re partners in our business and we need to think about it that way. So how do we, you know, how do we deliver performance to our partners? Because if we do that, they’ll continue to work with us.
Jeremy Weisz 37:16
Adrian, I have one last question before I ask it. I just want to thank you for sharing your lessons, your journey. I want to tell people if they haven’t been looking at the video, they can check out becauseiloveit.com to learn more about what we’re talking about and check out more episodes of the podcast.
My last question is about mentors and business mentors. You know throughout your career that may have helped you and maybe a good piece of advice that you got?
Adrian Capobianco 37:50
That’s a good question. You know what this I think this is, you always got to think about what you do well and what you don’t do well. I think earlier on in my career, I could have done, I should have done much better at actively seeking out mentors. I always kind of, you know, take learnings from folks, but I think in a more formal way, you know, if you’re someone much younger, you don’t even need to be younger at any point in your career. But when younger in my career, I think you get much more value from mentors, right?
Because what a mentor can add, you know, of the ten things you’re doing, you know, in a day is, you know, a 20 something, you know, in any kind of career work, a mentor can probably, you know, course correct or optimize you on half of those. So I could have done better at having more formal mentors when I was younger. Now, you mentioned our advisory board. I would consider every single person on our advisory board a mentor. And so I think, you know, that’s an amazing, amazing source of mentorship.
And, you know, mentors help kind of small things. I think the value of mentors as you get farther in your career is, you know, maybe it’s a tip, a suggestion, guidance. You know, once a month versus once a once a week. But the potential impact of that, of that idea or that suggestion is much larger as you go farther in your career. So I think, you know, the way we’ve structured our advisory board, I consider every one of our advisors a, you know, a personal and business mentor.
I would suggest, you know, and we’ve tried to not just kind of have just like an advisory board that’s on a PowerPoint slide to try to make it look good, but like we said, actually have them, as you know, co-owners and investors in the business so that everyone’s aligned.
Jeremy Weisz 39:40
No, I asked that because I figured this is really important to you because you have an advisory board, you have a group of mentors to help on various things in the business. What’s one thing that sticks out? I know you’ve probably gotten a lot of advice and lessons from the advisory board. What’s one that sticks out from one of the advisory board members that was helpful for you?
Adrian Capobianco 40:07
So sometimes it’s just obvious that, you know, speaking with one of our advisors about, you know, the sports deal, this NHL deal that we’re talking about. And there’s just a, you know, it seemed like kind of a smaller, obvious suggestion of as part of that deal, bringing in a few other, you know, pro players into our advisory board to expand that with a bit of a, you know, geographical kind of, you know, American focused Canadian focus. And it’s, you know, it was kind of a small, obvious thing. But at the end of the day, it seemed like, yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn’t we put that in? It cost, you know, our partners on the other side, nothing added value to us and now brings people, they’re involved.
So sometimes I find and I find myself asking more often saying like, this kind of makes sense to me. And I put it out there, you know, with less kind of pride behind it, say, like, it makes sense in my head. If it doesn’t in yours, tell me if it sounds full of crap or how I make it sound better. And I think, you know, acknowledging that I could have done better earlier on in my career with mentors is probably been a bit of inspiration to kind of formalizing this advisory board now.
And you know who I talked to. You know, I talked to most of our mentors at least twice a month. And, you know, of our dozen mentors, I’m talking to them. You know, I’m talking to our mentors five, six times a week saying, hey, what do you think of this? How about that?
They’re making suggestions or making introductions. So it’s really kind of an ongoing basis. It’s like I said, I don’t say this kind of light-heartedly, but, you know, very honored to have a great group of folks who are supporting us.
Jeremy Weisz 41:35
No, I love that, you know, putting it out there and obviously not everyone has an advisory board. You do. But whether you have someone in your life that you could use as a sounding board, because I feel like sometimes I’m too close to it, you know, I’m not thinking of a million different things. I just need to put it out there and say, what do you think? And I’m always amazed when I do that of all the different perspectives and ideas I get when I thought, oh, I thought everything through and I’m like, no, not even close. So thank you for sharing that. And thanks for —
Adrian Capobianco 42:10
Jeremy, you hit the nail on the head too, right? Sometimes we’re too close to it. Right? Like it makes sense. We’re too close to it. And we’ve kind of already arrived at the conclusion where maybe we need to back up and explain the question first. Right. So it’s that kind of outside, you know, a little bit outside voice that can be very valuable.
Jeremy Weisz 42:28
Totally. I want to encourage people to check out becauseiloveit.com and more episodes of the podcast. We’ll see everyone next time. And Adrian, thanks so much.
Adrian Capobianco 42:37
Thank you very much and have a great day.
