BILI Social Partners with NHLAA
Social-media and commerce company BecauseILoveIt.com (BILI Social), has entered an exclusive three-year partnership with the NHL Alumni Association (NHLAA). The goal is to help brands tap into the communities of former professional athletes through revenue-sharing opportunities. Players can promote products through social media and earn commissions through BILI Social.
Adrian Capobianco, Co-Founder and CEO of BILI Social, explained how the partnership works in more detail.
How did you come up with the idea for BILI?
Our mission is really to help connect brands and influencers and help influencers find products and services they love and share it with the audiences who love them. There’s social content, creators developing content and posting on their accounts. And there’s social commerce, the selling of products and services. We try as much as possible connect to content them to commerce. We’re not quite there yet in North America compared to Asian markets.
This is sort of turning ex-NHL players into influencers.
Many former NHL players or athletes in general are already influencers. The connection between BILI Social and the NHL was really how do we help athletes, in this case NHL alum, earn from social-media activity, from creating content, posting it for the audiences, promoting products or services.
Our process is making this turnkey for players. Then we bring brand partners to the table. Our role is to help the players earn beyond the field of play or the rink of play. When they’re playing on the ice on and off tour whatever it may be, there’s an opportunity for them to directly earn from that. To help scale this for the players so they can earn additional revenue from their social media activities. And for brands to be able to access the players at scale through our partnership.
Give me an example of how an NHL ex player would monetize his presence on a social media platform.
Brands will come to us and say we want to promote a product or service. Can you find some influencers and creators that can help us? We’ll find the creator or influencer who matches that brand’s needs. Athletes are very influential. They have audiences and fans and family that like to follow what they do. We’ll work with the players to create content around that brand and post that content on the player’s social media. Then, we’ll also often put ads behind that content and boost that content so that it gets to an audience. That’s the social content side.
What about the commerce side?
That’s for influencers and creators who want to take it to the next level by promoting and selling products. We create online stores for influencers and creators where they add their products and promote and sell those products. We’re doing a pilot right now with another organization, the Kenyan Football League, where we’re creating stores for the players to sell their personalized merch, team colors, name number, sell that to their friends and families and earn a pretty good commission compared to traditional merch deals.
Who are some of the more famous ex-NHL players who are participating?
One brand that we’re working with is Dr. Oetker, a consumer-packaged goods firm. They have a pizza brand and are focusing on youth and hockey teams and teamwork. They created a program called Practice with a Pro.
Teams get to submit to enter a chance to win an opportunity to practice with a pro. in this case it’s an on-ice experience with NHL legend Jarome Iginla who participates.
Which social media platforms are involved in this?
Any social media platform can be leveraged. Number one and number two are Instagram and TikTok in terms of reach, participation, cost effectiveness. Facebook would be third and then a mix of others, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. X.
Do any of these promotions focus on any particularly hyper local activation? there are certain regions in either Canada or the US that you’re focusing on?
When we think about social content, by nature, there really aren’t any borders. Some programs are regional, and only relevant in specific areas. There’s an estimated seven million creators in North America, and we have data on every single one. If you were a creator on Instagram, we would be able to look up your profile. We have audit data on every single one. We would be able to tell what percentage of your audience is from Canada, what are your top states, what areas, interests, etc. So, we have a lot of data to be able to target when programs are regional for our brand. If we’re looking for regions, we can target top cities.
We often do social content to amplify an event. Social can be great because we’ll get a creator to show up to that event create content from that event. Then they get to amplify the investment in that event, regionally, nationally, whatever that may be. There’s quite often a local element to it, whether it’s an event or making sure the creator has the right demographics.
How do you measure the impact?
By how many people actually watch that content. We will guarantee x-million number of views for that program based on the budget and the targeting, that sort of thing. When we deliver these views, we can be very local, down to an area code, a region, a city, a state, whatever that may be. When we’re boosting that content, we can get even more specific.
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