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THE INTRODUCTION
The go-to for Influencer Marketing
Alessandro Bogliari is the co-founder and CEO of The Influencer Marketing Factory, an influencer marketing agency he started in 2018, with $1,500 and no outside funding. Ten years into the industry, he's built IMF into an agency that runs influencer campaigns end-to-end for brands across industries, from creator vetting and strategy through reporting and performance.
Originally from Milan, Alessandro studied graphic design and art direction at NABA before earning a master's in digital innovation and management from the IT University of Copenhagen. Before The Influencer Marketing Factory, he ran a growth hacking agency.
He hosts The Influence Factor (a top 1% podcast) and guest lectures on influencer marketing at Cornell, NYU Stern, and Northwestern. He's based in New York.
ROLE
CEO & Co-Founder
COMPANY
CEO & Co-Founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory
CATEGORY
Influencer Marketing Agency
BASED
Los Angeles, United States
ONLINE
THE CREATORHAUZ INTERVIEW
Eight questions with Alessandro Bogliari
01
Thank you for taking the time to sit with us. Before we dive in, can you give us a quick introduction to who you are, what you do, the business or brand you’re building, your niche, how you got started, and what made you passionate about this space?
I'm Alessandro Bogliari, co-founder and CEO of The Influencer Marketing Factory. We're an influencer marketing agency I started back in 2018. We literally began with $1,500 and no outside funding!
I'm originally from Milan, studied graphic design there, then did a master's in digital innovation in Copenhagen. That mix ended up being useful because influencer marketing sits right at the intersection of creative and strategy. Before IMF I ran a growth hacking agency and wrote my master's thesis on how much to pay influencers on Instagram (before any calculator out there).
Our niche is influencer marketing end to end. We work with brands across industries, run campaigns with creators, handle the strategy and the reporting side of it too. I've been in this space over ten years now, and what keeps me in it is that it changes constantly. Platforms shift, formats shift, what works with an audience shifts every few months. It's never the same job twice.
Now I'm based in New York. Alongside the agency I host a podcast called The Influence Factor, and I guest lecture at places like Cornell, NYU Stern, and Northwestern, so I get to stay close to both the practitioner side and the teaching side of it.
02
As your audience and opportunities grew, what new roles did you have to learn to play—entrepreneur, negotiator, strategist, producer, manager, creative director—and which part of that evolution surprised you most?
Honestly, I've had to learn so many roles along the way, sales, negotiator, strategist, teacher, and the truth is every single day I think I've finally got it figured out, and then something happens that shows me I actually didn't know as much as I thought.
That's kind of the surprising part. It's not one big moment where you level up and you're done. It's constant. You think you've mastered a role, then a new deal or a new platform or a new student question at Cornell proves you still have gaps. I've made peace with that. I don't think you ever fully "arrive" running a business like this, you just keep finding out what you don't know yet.
We started with $1,500 and no funding. With no plan B, you don't hope to win. You get forced to win.
- Alessandro Bogliari
03
When you put the camera down and put your CEO hat on, what are you actually thinking about? What decisions matter most to the long-term health of your business?
When the camera's off, most of what I think about is boring compared to what people assume. Cash flow. Who's about to burn out on the team. Which client relationship is actually healthy versus just quiet.
Content and campaigns are the visible part. Running IMF day to day is mostly about people and numbers. Are we staffed right for the work we've sold. Are we saying yes to the right clients, not just any client. Is the team doing work that still challenges them or are we coasting.
The decisions that actually matter long term are rarely exciting. It's stuff like: do we take this client even though the fit feels off, do we hire ahead of revenue or wait, do we fix a process now while it's a small problem or let it become a big one in six months.
Almost 8 years in, the biggest shift in my thinking is that I spend less time on "how do we grow" and more time on "how do we not break what's already working while we grow."
Photographer Credit: unknown
Photographer IG: unknown
04
If we walked into your “studio”—whether that’s an actual production space, a team, or just the system behind how you work—what would we see happening that audiences rarely think about?
If you walked into IMF on a normal day, you wouldn't see anyone filming anything. You'd see people on calls with brands, going back and forth on creator lists, negotiating rates, chasing down deliverables that are three days late.
Behind every campaign that shows up as one nice post on someone's feed, there's a whole process nobody sees. Vetting dozens of creators before picking the right five. Writing briefs so the creative doesn't feel like an ad. Tracking performance in real time and going back to the brand mid-campaign if something's not landing. Handling the contract and payment side, which sounds boring until a creator ghosts you two days before a deadline and you're the one solving it.
What surprises people most is how much of it is operations, not creativity. Spreadsheets, reporting dashboards, project management, invoicing. The creative spark is maybe 20% of the work. The rest is making sure that spark actually reaches an audience, gets measured properly, and gets paid for correctly.
That's the studio. It's less a room with cameras and more a system of people making sure a hundred small things go right so one post looks effortless.
05
If a CMO came to you before launching their next creator campaign and asked, “What should we understand before we spend a dollar?”—what would you tell them?
If a CMO asked me that before launching a campaign, I'd tell them: stop starting with follower count. And stop starting with engagement rate too.
ER is just a percentage. On its own it doesn't tell you much, a high ER can come from a tiny loyal audience or from bots, you don't know until you dig in. Looking only at the numbers is a short look. Who's actually commenting, what they're saying, whether the audience matches your customer, that qualitative side matters just as much and most brands skip it entirely.
Second thing: give the creator a real brief, not a script. The posts that flop are almost always the ones where a brand hands over exact copy and forces the creator to read it like an ad. Their audience can tell in two seconds.
Third: know what you're actually trying to do before you spend anything. Sales, awareness, community, they need different creators and different formats. Half the wasted budget I've seen over ten years comes from brands skipping that question and jumping straight to "let's find some influencers."
06
We talk constantly about “influence,” but the word gets reduced to follower counts and engagement rates. What does genuine influence mean to you?
To me, real influence isn't a follower count or an engagement rate. It's whether someone acts on what you say.
I've seen creators with millions of followers who can't sell a single product, and creators with 30K who move real revenue every time they post. That gap is the whole story. Influence is trust that translates into action, someone buying something, showing up somewhere, changing their mind about something, because a specific person told them to.
After ten years watching this, the pattern is always the same. The creators who actually influence people aren't the loudest or the biggest. They're the ones whose audience believes they wouldn't recommend something they didn't actually use or believe in. The second that trust breaks, the numbers stop meaning anything.
Tools get commoditized. Judgment doesn't. That's the bet worth making.
- Alessandro Bogliari
07
As AI makes content faster and easier to produce at extraordinary scale, do you think distinctly human qualities—taste, trust, perspective, lived experience, community—become more valuable rather than less? How are you thinking about that?
I think the opposite of what a lot of people assume. AI makes content cheaper and faster, so the stuff that used to be hard, decent production, decent copy, a passable video, isn't a differentiator anymore. Everyone has access to it now.
Which means taste matters more, not less. Anyone can generate ten versions of an ad in a minute. Almost nobody can tell you which one is actually right for that brand, that audience, that moment. That judgment call is still human, and I don't see AI replacing it anytime soon.
Same with trust. AI can write in someone's voice, but it can't build the years of showing up that made an audience believe that voice in the first place. If anything, as feeds fill up with AI-generated content, the accounts that feel like an actual person with actual opinions are going to stand out more, not less.
08
This has been a blast. Thank you again for taking the time to sit with us. Let’s end by clearing something up: what’s one myth about creators, influencers, or this industry that you wish would finally disappear? And where can people connect with you and follow what you’re building next?
The myth I'd love to see disappear: that this industry is easy money. That you post a few things, get some free products, and call it a career.
What people don't see is the operational side. Contracts, negotiations, chasing payments, managing a dozen relationships at once, all while trying to stay creative. I've watched this industry grow from something brands didn't take seriously into a real channel with real budgets, and it happened because people did the unglamorous work behind the scenes, not because it was ever easy.
The other myth tied to that one: bigger following equals more value. I've said this before but it's worth repeating, a smaller, trusted audience beats a huge, passive one almost every time. Brands are finally catching on to that, slowly.
If people want to follow along, I'm on LinkedIn under my name, Alessandro Bogliari, and I host a podcast called The Influence Factor where I go deeper into all of this.
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