An editorial
start-up was born in Milan in 2020 to rethink information for younger people.
This is how Factanza was born, which today has a community of one million users
under 35 spread across Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, Linkedin and YouTube.
Giampaolo Colletti interviews Bianca Arrighini, CEO and co-founder of Factanza
for FARE INSIEME
FARE INSIEME STARTUP is the spin-off of the FARE
INSIEME project, dedicated to presenting some businesses that form part of the
Primo Ventures portfolio, a company that manages funds specialising in the
digital sector and new space economy. Confindustria Emilia has started up a
partnership with Primo Ventures with the objective of providing its associates
with new opportunities for growth thanks to the presentation of the most
innovative start-ups on the market. Here are some of their stories.
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
There are
companies that arise from apparently trivial intuitions, but which prove
successful in grasping the evolution of markets, relationships and consumption.
The story we are about to tell best illustrates a brilliant idea - one could
define it as "wow" - which is rewriting the understanding of
information for younger people through social media. But to explain it better,
let's take a step back. In time and space. The
whole picture is the whole image. That is, the overall vision. This is the
claim launched by the authoritative English newspaper The Guardian already in
the 1980s. But while this overall vision back in 1984, the year the message was
adopted, was expressed exclusively thanks to the journalistic role, today
everything is rethought in an indistinct amalgam that sees the end user as
central.
Values and channels. From the
social world of The Guardian to the editorial challenges of our own context. A
publishing start-up was born in Italy a few years ago, which is leading the
way. It all started in 2019 within the Bocconi University. Bianca Arrighini and
Livia Viganò – both born in 1997 and at the time students in Economics at
Bocconi – realised that no one was getting information by reading the paper
newspaper. «In our third year of
university we decided that we could think about bringing information to young
people by focusing on their channels and their language, which is also ours. So
we chose the photographic social network Instagram in a very natural way,
because both we and our peers spent a lot of time there - almost up to ten
hours - and at the time it was used very little for information», says Bianca Arrighini, CEO and co-founder of
Factanza. So, this is the name of the new media company with thousands of
followers that has the aim to make information and current affairs smarter and
more accessible to younger people. A claim that is a manifesto of values: the information that creates (in)dependence.
Because the goal is to explain the world in a few seconds. Factanza was thus
born to revolutionise the world of information, adapting it to the way of
communicating of the new generations. It is responsible for disseminating
essential information on its social channels every day so as to be updated on
current events in just a few minutes, with formats created to capture attention
and make users more aware of what is happening in the world. It has a community
of 1 million users under 35, distributed across Instagram, TikTok, Telegram,
Linkedin and Facebook. Its business model is based on branded content: content
sponsored on Factanza profiles by companies that want to communicate their
values and initiatives to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to
reach. And the target? Becoming the new
point of reference for quality information on social media for Zoomers and
Millennials, filling a market void by providing educational information and
news that helps new generations understand what is happening in the world.
Company
profile. Today the
headquarters is in Milan, in the iconic Porta Venezia, a crossroads of
cultures. The team is made up of fourteen people. There is the editorial part,
the graphics part and then the commercial part. «Today it is complicated to
find the right figures because it is very different to write a traditional
article for social use, that is, to explain complex facts in a simple but not
simplistic way. We search for profiles that convince us from an attitudinal
point of view: that is, girls and boys who are curious, proactive, and
problem-solvers», says Arrighini. Meanwhile, the editorial project was supported
by Primo dPixel in 2021 with 30 thousand euros dedicated to the acceleration
and the turnover for the year is estimated at 1 million euros. The mission is
always that of the debut: to bring accessible information to the new
generations with a very specific editorial line, expanding products and
services. We talk about contemporaneity, including frontier themes. «We have
dealt with mental health or meritocracy. We are a poorer generation in a more
difficult world and we document it in what we do», concludes Arrighini.
Looking at the present, wondering about the future. What incredible challenges!
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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