[Fully Managed] Alessandro Bogliari Ep. 98 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Shannon Penji (Host): All righty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast, the podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you on your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon Penji, Partnership Coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Alessandro Bogliari from the Influencer Marketing Factory.

Thank you so much for coming on with me today. I really appreciate it.

Alessandro Bogliari: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Shannon: Of course. And we, you know, we both had a funny start to our day. So, you know, we’re on the same wavelength, so everyone be very kind to us for this podcast.

Alessandro: Yes, we need that today.

Shannon: We need that.

Alessandro’s Background

Shannon: Alrighty, could you start by telling me a little and telling us a little bit about yourself, kind of how you got to this point in your life, and what kind of inspired you to start this company?

Alessandro: I’ll try to make a long story short, you know, we Italians, we speak a lot, right? That’s what we do, we talk a lot. And when asked a question, it could be one minute becomes one hour. We do the opposite – instead of making a long story short, we make a short story long, right?

But basically, I currently live in New York City. I’m from Italy as you can easily see from my accent, but I’ve lived in different cities before moving to New York. I actually lived in Copenhagen, Denmark while I was doing my master’s degree. Then I moved to Miami, which was actually the opposite weather of Copenhagen. I was like, “Okay, where should I go after the dark and all the rain?” Miami – fantastic. And after a couple of years in Miami, my dream city has always been New York City. So that’s what I did. And actually I founded the company when I was back in Miami.

My story with influencer marketing starts when I was in Copenhagen. Basically when I was doing my master thesis – and I was already working. I started working since I was maybe 14, 15, while going to school. I’ve always had this entrepreneurial mindset, right? Starting to try to make money with AdSense when I was very young. Then I created my first startup when I was 18, 19, which was this website about what to do in my city, Milano. I didn’t make a single dollar there, but I managed like 20 people. So I learned all these soft skills like leadership, how to manage a team, creative ideas, and so on.

Moving forward in Copenhagen, I had to write this master thesis. I was like, “Okay, let me combine two things,” because I never really liked the academia world. So I thought, if I have to do this thing – because writing a hundred pages thesis is never fun – let me do something that I’m already working on. At the time I was already working in the influencer marketing space. This was almost 10 years ago, and influencer marketing at the time was very different than what it is now.

I got fascinated and I was like, “Wow, this can become big.” People want to see other people like them talking in front of a camera, and they can make money with that. So basically I wrote this thesis about how much to pay influencers on Instagram at the time because it was like the wild west. I created the first calculator nine years ago or so. Now you can find many of them online, like how much you should be paid. But my thesis had the data behind these funny videos of people telling you what to buy.

I continued working in influencer marketing and I was like, “This is going to be big.” And then when I moved to Miami, I thought it was time for me to create this agency. Then I started Influencer Marketing Factory. It started as an experiment. We just put in a very minimal budget – we started the company with $1,500. It was basically what we had in terms of saved money as immigrants living in another country, in an expensive country.

And then we said, “Let’s do these things about influencers. Let’s just get a few clients.” And then things exploded, especially during Covid. So now we’ve grown to a company of more than 50 people. It’s a global agency. We work with everyone from Fortune 500 clients to mid enterprise and small businesses sometimes. It basically started as an experiment on something that I liked to do, which is influencer marketing. Now we have one of the top three to five agencies in the marketing arena.

Building on Personal Interest

Shannon: That’s beautiful and I love when something starts as kind of just something that you’re interested in. I feel like a lot of people go into spaces because they’re like, “Oh, this is untapped, or this is something that people aren’t doing already,” but it’s really nice that this was something that inspired you from earlier on and that you got into because it just happened to boom at like this perfect time.

Alessandro: I’d like to add also that, based on the untapped market, I was a big fan of Vine. If you remember that – it was fantastic. And when it was discontinued because creators were not making money, that’s where I started looking for another thing. I was like, “Okay, what is next?” Because this Vine thing with short form videos, it was like, this is the future. You can get in front of millions of people with just seven seconds, six seconds.

So I started looking around and I found out about Musical.ly. I remember looking at Musical.ly and thinking, “This is not the place for me. It’s a bunch of very young people lip syncing and dancing.” That’s not for me, and I just let it go.

But then I went back on YouTube and started looking at these compilations during the transition from Musical.ly to TikTok. And I was like, “Okay, this is it.” And I bet 100% on it. We became one of the first agencies in the world to start offering TikTok services. We got clients like Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music Group. They wanted to launch songs and artists on TikTok.

So we became that TikTok agency. Then we, of course, started offering more things. But the untapped market was not just influencer marketing, it was short form video specifically on TikTok.

Platforms and Content Types

Shannon: That’s awesome. Do you also work in long form media or longer form media, I should say? Because I know YouTube is still technically short, but you know what I’m saying.

Alessandro: We do now. We primarily do TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. I would say that these days it’s a good mix. Clients come to us because they want to experiment. Many times you don’t really know who’s going to be the right medium and the right format for you until you test it.

What we say all the time is that if you want to do a multi-platform approach, do it. Because many times brands think that they know their audience, they think they know what is going to work, but until you don’t test it, you don’t really know. If they have the budget, we always advise them to test the waters and see what works and what doesn’t for them.

Managing Client Expectations

Shannon: So if a company comes to you with like an objectively bad idea for a campaign, what do you kind of do in that situation?

Alessandro: So we educate them, right? Because at the end of the day, you want the client happy and you want retention in an agency. It would be very difficult to have the client happy and retain them if they come with an idea that is not going to work, and we are the experts.

We’re not here just to say, “Okay, we’re going to just close the campaign, get the money, run it and don’t care about it.” We all know that the cost of acquiring a new client is higher compared to having the possibility to continue working for months, if not for years, with the same client.

So because of that, we politely tell them, “This might not be the best idea for all these reasons,” because of the historical data that we have. We do have people that spend time every day looking at trends on TikTok. They look at what is happening on YouTube shorts, they see what is happening on Instagram reels and so on.

Based on that, we try to bring them to what would work. At the end of the day, if the client is still convinced like, “No, we want to do that,” we put it on paper and say, “Hey, we do think that it might not be the best way to go, but if this is your final decision, it’s your money. It’s your last call.” And so we do it.

And it happened in the past. They were like, “Oh, this didn’t work out,” and we reminded them of our conversation where we told them about that. It’s similar to whenever you want advice from your attorney or from your accountant. Sometimes you don’t listen to their expertise or advice, and then something bad happens, and you realize you should have listened.

We try to educate a lot. I think the educational side from an agency is quite crucial for our clients.

Shannon: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s really nice to be able to cater to the client because sometimes, even though you have an expert opinion and they’re coming to you for a service, sometimes they know their audience a little better. But sometimes they’re just kind of off base because they’re focused on the wrong things.

Alessandro: Yes, because it’s their product. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what they should do. They might think, “This is what works for us.” And we’re like, “Okay, but have you tested other formats?” “No, because this is the way to go for us.”

Until you do, especially with paid media – we do a lot of boosting of campaigns. If we take TikTok specifically, you can do Spark ads, for instance. And what we advise all the time is to take two totally different formats in terms of video touch and feel, tone of voice, 30 seconds versus one minute, whatever. And you test them. You will not know what actually people want to see until you test.

Another example could be doing a very polished video in a studio versus another that is very raw and natural. You’ll see that many times, the one that looks like you spent 10 seconds to make performs way better than the one where you spent thousands of dollars in a studio with professional actors. Because that usually doesn’t work on social media.

What I say all the time is that instead of just your gut feeling, look at the data. At the end of the day, this is marketing, and you have to look at data to determine what works for the future and what doesn’t.

The Value of Data

Shannon: Yeah, of course. I think that data is also something that’s obviously valuable to be able to show a client, “Hey, this isn’t working, or this is working.” And I think that sometimes, especially when it’s earlier on in a company, they’re looking at, “Oh, we’re just getting views from this,” so they think that’s working because they’re getting views, but they don’t realize how much better it could be if they tried something else. Sometimes they just view this narrow scope of like, “This is good enough to get people to buy this product or service.” So it’s nice to be able to show them the data that maybe they don’t have, or maybe they don’t know that they can have.

Alessandro: Yeah, or also telling them each medium is different from the other. You cannot expect to do a video that was working on Instagram and put it on YouTube shorts. It doesn’t translate necessarily because you have different audiences every time.

There is common sense for those who work in influencer marketing, but many times brands think, “Oh, I made this video, let me just post it everywhere.” You can do that, yes. But if you really want to succeed, you have to understand that a type of humor that is happening on TikTok might not work elsewhere.

These days I’m seeing a lot of these videos where the comments are like, “I feel I have no one that I can share this to,” because there are so many references in a video. Maybe a video is a remix of reference to a movie from the eighties with so much pop culture and niche culture happening these days.

Think about Reddit – there are so many subreddits of very niche things that you wouldn’t even expect. Just to say, don’t think that your audience is going to be one unified group. These days it’s very fractional. You can find the same person with different accounts on each social media platform, and they might follow different things and react differently to each type of content. That is something to take into consideration even before doing your content calendar.

Generational and Cultural Differences

Shannon: I completely understand that, and I think there are also generational differences for each platform. Facebook is for an older group because Instagram came out later and a lot of people just didn’t get with that. And then TikTok is even later where it’s short form content. My parents won’t even watch a TikTok with me – they don’t want to see a short video. Their attention span doesn’t want that.

And sometimes it’s just not for certain people. I don’t prefer to watch TikToks because I felt like it rotted my brain for a bit and I was spending too much time on it, so I deleted it. There’s a lot of people that don’t use it for specific reasons, and that’s an untapped audience.

Whereas I love YouTube, but I don’t want to watch long form content on TikTok. You can watch up to 10 minutes on TikTok now instead of one or two minutes, but I don’t want to watch a 10-minute video on TikTok because most of them are not that long. But I will watch a 10-minute video on YouTube because I know what I’m signing up for.

Alessandro: Absolutely. I also think it’s about user behaviors depending on the country, continent, even sometimes that you’re in. If you think about Korean dramas, there are a lot of apps in China dedicated to short dramas. There are so many apps that basically only offer that.

Also, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, started with longer videos years ago. Especially in China and other places in Asia, they’re used to having mobile even before having laptops sometimes. There are all these historical differences in certain areas. It was easier to have a mobile phone than a connection with the internet with a typical computer.

Because of that, in terms of behaviors, people in those regions are used to having everything on a small screen, whether shorter or longer content. While for us in Europe and the US, we are used to watching longer videos on TV. That’s why these days a lot of people use connected TV with YouTube. A bunch of people are watching more YouTube than Netflix on TV.

So for us, the idea is short form videos on mobile and then longer content on laptop or TV, while in China, many times they can watch both on mobile. So I think that sometimes it’s not a technical question. It’s about behavioral, historical, and cultural questions. And it doesn’t translate easily. It took 20, 30, 40 years for certain countries to change, and so it’s not going to happen overnight in the US at least.

Cultural Differences in Content Consumption

Shannon: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point because I don’t always consider the cultural differences between content consumption. There’s probably vast differences that I just wouldn’t even know. I’ve never been out of the country, which is insane. I don’t even own a passport. I would love to travel, but it just hasn’t happened yet. I’m on the younger side.

Alessandro: That’s the thing – you learn a lot about that. Each culture is different. Last time I was in Indonesia, Bali, I had the chance to talk with people before TikTok was banned there. I talked with people about livestream shopping. It’s something I really look forward to coming more to the US. TikTok is investing in that, Instagram did some ups and downs with it, YouTube is still not there yet, Twitter (now X) tried to do that.

When I talked with them, I realized that a lot of people in Indonesia, before the ban, were spending hours watching livestream shopping. While in the US, people got used to QVC from 20 years ago. So they’re like, “Okay, this is nothing new.” It’s actually totally different, but it’s not that novelty.

I think that these days, social commerce is working very well in the US if you see just TikTok shop – people with affiliate links are killing it. But we’re still missing livestream shopping because there are not enough incentives when you watch it in the US.

In China, there’s a lot happening in livestream shopping – there’s a lot of gamification and incentives. If you stay on, there might be a drop collection, or if you stay on, only the first 10 people are going to get this discount. Well, in the US as of now, it’s more about, “I’m going to show you the product,” but there is no incentive for me to stay and spend my time with the host.

The importance of talking with other cultures and other countries makes you realize that there are so many more possibilities. And again, it’s not about technical skills or technical problems and issues or gaps. It is more about the behavior and the culture of the people in front of the screen.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s an incredible point because I think that a lot of people aren’t considering those factors. There’s a lot of times it’s just a narrow focus on the US if that’s where the company started. And of course, if the majority of your audience is in one country, then focus on that country if that’s what works best for you. But if you’re focused on more of a monetary value and you want to reach more people, then it is important to factor in those things.

That’s something that I haven’t really considered as much because I guess I’m not as culturally well-rounded. The only thing I learn is from television mostly and the news, which is not great. The news has propaganda, television shows are dramatized. I try to stay as culturally informed as I can in the country. But unfortunately without traveling, I feel like I can’t learn as much as I could while doing that. So that’s a bucket list item.

Selecting Influencers

Shannon: We’re going to switch topics because I feel like we were talking about that for a lot, but it was really informative, so thank you. Could you talk about whether you have a type of influencer that you look for when recruiting? I’m sure they’re different per campaign, but do you have specific criteria?

Alessandro: Yes, so it depends. We do two things in the company – we do both campaign management, where we source influencers that we do not represent, but we also have a talent agency where we exclusively represent certain people.

For campaign management, it’s about quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative is basically numbers, metrics, historical data – how many clicks did you get in past campaigns, are you able to tell us match rates, did you sell through your unique link, etc.

Then there is also qualitative data – what is the touch and feel of their videos? What type of humor do they use? Is it informative? Have they been in any scandals in the past? Are they using bad words in their videos? Is it brand safe?

But when it comes to our talent agency – representing people – we’re always quality over quantity. We don’t want to be that agency that has 500 people they represent and then only 50 of them (10%) actually work, while all the others don’t get enough attention.

We’re looking for professional people. The barrier to becoming an influencer is very low – everyone can be a content creator. Creating content is easy – we’re creating content right now, both of us. But it’s difficult to make quality content – that’s another level. And then the next level is: how do you influence people?

After all these things plus quantitative and qualitative analysis, it’s about whether this person is professional. It’s easy these days to get 10 million views on one TikTok video. Does that mean you’re actually an influencer? Does it mean you’re going to be a professional?

We want to be sure that whenever we work with people, they take this seriously because they’re taking money. They’ll check all the items in the scope of work, they’ll meet deadlines, they’ll respect the agreement. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not that professional. They might be fantastic creators, they might be great influencers, but it doesn’t mean you can rely on them.

So whenever we want to find exclusive people to represent, we want to be sure that they’re professionals who take that seriously. That’s how they make their money, and we want to be sure it’s the right fit. It’s easy to think, “This person went viral online,” but that’s not enough anymore.

Campaign Challenges

Shannon: Is there ever a point where you pair an influencer with a campaign and it’s not the right fit?

Alessandro: Of course it happens. We manage hundreds of campaigns that translate to thousands of people that we hire every year. Because of the law of big numbers, it could be a miscommunication with the clients. Maybe the client thought that type of influencer was going to work well for that campaign, and then we find out that was not the case.

Sometimes, going back to being professional, it could be that the person starts applying to you, but when they have to create the content, they don’t provide it. Unfortunately, there are people who are not professional and they take their time to get back to you or they don’t get back to you at all.

Or maybe sometimes, even though the agreement says they have to do a couple of edits, someone might say, “No, I will not do that, and I still want to be paid.” And then the client is upset.

The pro and con of influencer marketing is that it works – it brings great ROI and you can create fantastic content. The pro also is that it’s a people business, meaning that you can co-create. Part of the con is that it’s a people business too. Because many times, you don’t really know what you’re getting – it’s not like AI where you click a button.

You have to communicate with the person, and with some people you don’t even communicate by email – with some it’s by iMessage, DM, or WhatsApp. It’s difficult sometimes to manage these types of things.

So it could happen that you think a person is going to be great and professional, and then you find out they’re not. But I would say that it’s minimal compared to other challenges. It could happen as in any other industry. It’s part of the business.

Shannon: Yeah, you just move people around if that’s the case. That makes a lot of sense. I didn’t even process the amount of challenges that would come with communication because it’s not really uniform.

Alessandro: Exactly. Someone might not even have their email address on their bio, so you have to contact them by DM. Some people give you the email and you continue by email, others continue by DM. It’s very time consuming, and that’s why many times you cannot do influencer marketing just on a platform.

People think, “Oh, I have a platform, I can go there and select people.” No, that’s a great starting point. But then all the communication, negotiation of pricing, negotiation of deliverables – all that is part of human communication. And it’s very difficult to do it in black or white with a platform.

You can use platforms, but if you want to do this in a specific way and be sure that the ROI is going to be there, you need to have the human component with expertise behind that.

Shannon: Yeah, you need to be able to navigate those communication issues, but also be personable and understanding of those hard and soft skills together.

Alessandro: Exactly.

Shannon: That’s something I wouldn’t have even thought of, because a lot of marketing agencies have a very streamlined process, but that’s the difficulty with working with people rather than whole companies.

Favorite Campaigns

Shannon: Do you have a favorite campaign that you’ve ever worked on? Maybe you’re not allowed to single anyone out, so you don’t have to describe exactly.

Alessandro: Without mentioning specifics, I like those campaigns that we run when there is also an in-person component. I like that part. It could be when we work with automotive – you need to have something in person where you either test drive the car or show the interiors. That makes a huge difference. You cannot make a video of a car in your room like you can with a beauty product.

Or I like when there are clients that maybe focus on experiences, like events or traveling. You can create fantastic content because you send people on a plane and then they go to a place. There is so much storytelling behind that.

So I like all those campaigns with rich storytelling and in-person meetings. I’m not saying that content created in your room is not effective. But I think people want to see more and more connections between humans.

The storytelling process is crucial. When you have many factors such as traveling to a place or going to an event, there are going to be things that you might not expect happening. And I think that gives color to a story because something might happen during the recording that you weren’t expecting. And that could be that little twist in the video that generates millions of views.

I like that component because you can use unexpected things to actually give value to your content. If everything is scripted, it could be great, but it will be missing that juicy, unpredictable element.

Shannon: Yeah, the more interesting part that you might not be able to plan for, but is definitely a viewer-grabber.

Alessandro: Exactly.

Shannon: Do you get to go to these places or is it only the influencer that gets to go?

Alessandro: I wish! Sometimes I think I’m on the wrong side. When I put my first YouTube videos in 2009 or something, you didn’t want to tell people you were uploading videos on YouTube. That was the era when it was such a hobby, and people looked at you weirdly.

Shannon: I very much remember that. I was a big YouTube watcher when I was younger, and I remember the shame around being a content creator because it wasn’t like a job yet.

Alessandro: Exactly. So when I did that and then stopped making those videos, sometimes I think, “What if?” What if I had continued and now would be an influencer traveling the world and being paid for all these things?

But jokes apart, usually, unless it’s something more corporate, we don’t attend. We do organize events where influencers attend, and maybe there’s the CEO of the company launching a new product. In that case, yes, maybe I would go because it’s also networking and a nice way to talk with the client. But if we’re talking about going to Barbados with a group – no, that’s not going to be the case, unfortunately. I would love to be part of it, but it’s difficult to justify the cost. But I would love to.

Shannon: That stinks. But you still know you’re getting success from the campaign, even if you don’t get to go. It’s still really fun.

Closing

Shannon: Oh, well, unfortunately we don’t have time for our game today because we’re all out of time. I’m so sorry.

Alessandro: We talked too much. I’m sorry about that.

Shannon: No, it was perfect. I love talking. That’s the best part of the podcast. And I think that I learned a lot, which is really lovely because I don’t think I’ve talked to an influencer marketing agency before, so this is a nice untapped area to talk about. My favorite part is learning on the podcast. I hope I never stop saying it because I get to learn from everyone. So I appreciate the talking. If you talked less, maybe I wouldn’t have learned as much.

Alessandro: I’m still learning, trying to make things a bit faster, but it’s difficult. I told you that the Italian DNA is there.

Shannon: Yeah, my mom thought we were Italian our entire lives. And then I took one of those 23 and Me tests and found out that wasn’t true. And it was really funny because she made it like a personality trait. And it was kind of a stereotype.

Alessandro: Like an identity crisis happening.

Shannon: Yeah, I get my hand gesturing from her. But we’re from New Jersey and a lot of people say that’s one and the same, which is not, but I grew up around a bunch of Italians, so it’s always very refreshing.

But thank you again so much for coming on with me today. I really appreciate it. This was absolutely lovely. I learned a lot and that’s always my favorite thing.

And thank you everyone for watching and/or listening. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to hear more awesome stories like this. Thank you so much.

Apple Music

Spotify

Amazon