Alessandro Biggi joined Zooppa 2 years ago, a leading creative platform for the production of engaging video and graphic content recognized among the top 100 Brilliant Companies by ‘Entrepreneur Magazine’. He also is an entrepreneur that has found Avocaderia and 20lines.com sold to HarperCollins Publishers.

-Zooppa is a platform that connects talent from around the world with prestigious brands looking for great stories. How did the idea come about?

We believe that at a time in which every brand is required to be a publisher, technology should be at the center of how we approach content creation. We use technology to engage a global creative department composed by thousands of professional filmmakers, photographers, designers and storytellers. This approach allows us to keep a lean and scalable structure, reducing overhead costs for the clients while providing job opportunities to professional creatives around the world.

– Zooppa started 10 years ago. How would you rate its history up to here?

Zooppa was born in 2007 with the idea of disrupting the advertising world by applying the principles of crowdsourcing. As the market evolved, we kept investing into technology in order to develop a new service model that allows brands to easily access creativity from all around the world.

-You currently have offices in New York, Seattle, Milan and Venice. In 2015, you have been recognized among the top 100 Brilliant Companies by Entrepreneur Magazine. What does New York have to set up one of Zooppa’s offices?

New York is the Mecca of advertising. We opened our office there 1 year ago and the results have been amazing: it offers great exposure but most of all it has a very intertwined network of professionals that collaborate to define new trends in the market. We’ve been able to get some really good introductions and, if you work well, the word spreads around quite easily… which is amazing!

-You work with more than 450,000 creatives. What stories do corporations look for?

Storytelling is effective when it’s authentic and that’s what brands are looking for in a piece of content. Every time we receive a brief, we invite different creatives to pitch for the job in order to collect multiple perspectives that can better respond to the clients’ needs. We recently realized a great storytelling project for Enterprise Rental Car based on a real road trip where musicians were asked to write an original song. The videos are amazing and are performing very well, here is the case study: https://www.zooppa.com/en/case-studies/enterprise/

-What are the medium-term objectives of Zooppa?

Our goal in the last 2 years has been to become self-sustainable. Looking ahead, the objective is to grow the revenues while we keep a Lean structure that really leverages technology to scale operations. The best way to do that is by retaining key clients, developing trust relationships while looking at new business opportunities with brands that are a great fit with our model.

-You also collaborate with H-Farm. Can you explain this project?

H-Farm is the major innovation platform in Italy. That’s where Zooppa was started and were most of the cool startups in Italy come to life. In the last few years H-Farm has become a public company and with that it also started a new business division focused on education, which is extremely interesting as it applies a new learning model based on experiences and technology.

-You have also given entrepreneurship classes at the Università Ca’Foscari Venezia. Where does your entrepreneurial vocation come from?

I like to think about new ideas, but what really excites me is seeing them coming to life. It’s not an easy process, but it can be very rewarding from many points of view.

-You come from Italy. How is it to live and work in the big apple?

How do they say… “If you make it there, you can make it everywhere”…

Although NYC is not an easy place to live I love its unique speed and atmosphere! It offers so many different opportunities, both work wise and on a personal level.

On the other hand, I always miss Italy (and the food) and I think I’ll probably go back in a few years!

-You were President of the Chapter ESADE Alumni Milan. What could you tell us about that experience?

Being involved with ESADE Alumni has been a great experience. The Italian network is one of the largest so it offers a lot of opportunities to connect across a different set of experiences and skills. We organized some nice events and involved important guests speakers that were always keen to participate.

-What are the benefits of the international network of ESADE Alumni?

The more you grow in your career, the higher the importance of the network. It’s interesting to see how many friends now have become business partners in one way or another. ESADE Alumni is the essence of that, making it easy to build and maintain relationships with people that share the same mindset.