UGC – Isn’t That a Fighting Event?

It’s time to put down that creative brief and pick up your phone. 

After years of being sold to through platforms that were originally designed for sharing party photos and reconnecting with people from school, audiences have become oversaturated and indifferent to big brand marketing. Scrolling past ads is easier than ever and doing so has become a reflex. 

User Generated Content (UGC) entered the advertising conversation a few years ago and is now pretty big business, and the main reason behind that is simple: it works really well. 

UGC is typically video format and sits within the broader category of ads that don't look like ads. The best examples feature a thumb-stopping hook in the opening seconds, followed by content that holds attention in a world where that’s in short supply. 

There are two main routes worth considering when it comes to UGC: creator content and DIY. Both have their place, and the right choice depends on budget, category, and how much the brand is prepared to relinquish control of its own narrative. 

Creator Content

Creators (also referred to as influencers) are people with established followings on social media who can be hired to produce content featuring a product or service and distribute it to their audiences. 

Pricing is variable and based on a fairly long list of factors: follower count, industry, the number and length of videos required, usage rights, exclusivity, and several others. There is no standard rate card for this, which makes the whole thing feel a bit like negotiating at a market. 

What creator-led content does well is fairly clear. It's the modern equivalent of a celebrity endorsement - adding social proof and a degree of authority from someone with a pre-built, trusting audience - and creators are, by and large, practiced at producing engaging content that shows a product being used in a natural, everyday context. The assets produced can typically be repurposed across multiple channels, which improves the overall value of the investment. 

The potential downsides are also worth considering. Pricing varies wildly from creator to creator and though we mentioned that quality should be high, it’s not guaranteed simply because someone has a large following. It's always worth setting out detailed deliverables before anything is agreed, and any contract signed should include the words 'satisfactory quality' in the payment clause.

DIY

Getting a phone out and shooting something yourself can feel quite daunting, and also like an underwhelming solution to a marketing problem, but brand-led UGC regularly outperforms professionally shot branded content. 

There are some baseline quality standards that need to be met for the ad to do its job, but with a bit of practice and a clear set of guidelines, the barrier to producing effective content this way is lower than most brands assume. A few formats worth trialling: 

• Ambassador / CEO-led content.

Authentic stories from the people most connected to the product - a founder, a member of staff, a long-standing brand ambassador. People respond to genuine enthusiasm in a way they don't respond to polished copy. 

• FAQ content.  

Answering common customer questions directly, or talking through the problem the product solves. Useful, unpretentious, and easier to produce than almost anything else. 

• Trend-based videos. 

This one requires a quick-to-act approach from whoever's running the social channels - viral formats move fast on TikTok and the window for relevance is short, but when it lands, the awareness spikes can be significant. 

See below tips and guidelines on how to produce your own DIY UGC: 

Hook first, everything else second.

The first two to three seconds of a video tend to determine whether anyone watches the rest of it, so it's worth putting some thought into the opening before anything else. Something visually interesting, a direct question, or a bold statement will do the job better than a logo or a brand introduction - those can come later in the video, or not at all. 

Shoot vertically. 

The majority of UGC is watched on mobile, full-screen, so vertical framing is worth getting into the habit of early. It's a small thing, but landscape video on social tends to give the impression of a brand that's still finding its feet on the platform. 

Lighting matters more than the camera.

A phone shot in good natural light will almost always look better than a poorly lit setup with expensive equipment. A window and a bright day is genuinely all that's needed to get started - a ring light works well as a backup if natural light isn't available. 

Keep it short.

Attention on social moves quickly, and most platforms reward brevity. A good starting point is somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds - if a video needs to run longer than that, it's worth making sure every extra second is earning its place. 

Sound is non-negotiable.

A lot of people scroll with the sound off, so adding captions is a good habit to build in - most platforms will generate these automatically, though it's always worth a quick check before publishing. For anything with spoken audio, a clip-on microphone is a relatively small investment and makes a noticeable difference to how professional the finished video feels. 

Speak naturally, not from a script.

Part of what makes UGC work is that it doesn't feel like an ad, and a scripted delivery tends to undermine that fairly quickly. If having some notes to hand helps, that's absolutely fine - just treat them as a loose guide rather than something to be read from word for word. 

One clear message per video.

Trying to fit too many product benefits into a single 30-second video can make it feel rushed and muddy the message. Settling on one theme per creative, focusing on that, and then creating a separate video for anything else worth saying tends to produce better results all round. 

Test, then iterate.

The first few videos will be a learning exercise as much as anything else. Running a couple of versions with different hooks or angles and seeing what the data suggests is a much more reliable way of finding what works than trying to get everything right first time. 

Wrapping up

The reason UGC has maintained its position in the conversation for as long as it has is that it solves a real problem: audiences have become good at filtering out advertising. 

Whether the route is a creator with an established following or someone from the business standing in front of a camera, the underlying logic is the same - relevance and authenticity tend to outperform production value, and the budget freed up by not engaging a creative agency can usually be reinvested elsewhere. The bar to entry is genuinely low. The main requirement is being willing to give it a go.