Honest takes on UGC content creation — what works, what doesn't, and how to create content that actually converts.
18 articles
Adding production value breaks luxury beauty UGC. What reads as expensive on camera is pace, fewer cuts, and a register closer to understatement.
Five checks for hiring a fitness UGC creator: competence on camera, real effort, honest claims, the right setup, and a brief that fits the room.
You cannot show a skincare result in thirty seconds, so the video has to sell texture, ritual and sensation. What to brief, and the before-and-after trap.
The five things a brief needs, a one-page layout and three vague lines rewritten, from the creator who has to shoot from it.
Agitation reads as empathy on a page and as an insult on camera. How I cut the middle beat to one sentence and keep the formula working.
The format with the highest failure cost, because what breaks it isn't the edit. What I will and won't put my name to, and how to brief it.
Both cost the same to shoot. One buys trust you cannot add later, the other a file you can change your mind about six weeks on.
One buys an object you keep, the other a moment that happens. The single question that tells you which you need.
In lifestyle the product is incidental to the frame, so a shot list cannot brief it. What to send instead of a mood word, and how to tell if I am the right fit.
The interface eats the bottom of your frame, most viewers hear nothing, and baked-in captions trap the file. What changes when UGC becomes ad creative.
Your product goes on my face, phones smooth skin by default, and by month four you need a library that looks like one brand. How to hire for that.
Hiring a UGC creator is a sequence, and most wasted budget comes from doing it out of order. Seven steps, from the person on the other end of the enquiry.
What a UGC quote actually buys, what an agency premium pays for, how to spend a tight budget, and the three ways a creative budget gets spent twice.
What you're really asking a creator for when you ask for whitelisting — why it outperforms, why it's priced separately, and where the four-day delay comes from.
Three videos isn't a split test. Why ordering one at a time is the costly way to buy creative, and how to structure volume so each round teaches you something.
Organic, paid, whitelisting, term, exclusivity. Why rights are priced the way they are, and why licensing a whole test batch beats renegotiating for a winner.
Gifted buys you a chance. Paid buys you a deliverable. What each arrangement actually covers, and the expensive mistake of buying one and needing the other.
Ecommerce brands and creators run on completely different clocks. Why the Q4 booking deadline is set by your split testing window rather than your sale date — and what that means for a launch versus an established brand.