What is UGC?

The definition

UGC stands for user-generated content. In practice, it’s video and images that look like they were filmed by an ordinary person on their phone. Someone unboxing a product on the kitchen counter. Someone talking straight into the selfie camera about something she’s tried. Natural light, slightly uneven sound, no studio.

Still, most of the UGC you see in ads isn’t made by random customers. It’s made by creators who get paid for it, or cut from raw footage the company has collected. “User-generated” describes how the content looks, not necessarily who made it.

Why UGC works in ads

On Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, your ad competes with content from friends and people users follow. Anything that looks like a commercial gets scrolled past. A person talking straight to the camera looks like what people are there to see, and so gets a few more seconds of attention. Those seconds are what the ad has to say something.

What separates a good UGC ad from a bad one is rarely image quality. It’s the first two to three seconds (the hook), that it’s shot vertically (9:16), and that it has on-screen text for everyone watching without sound. Meta and TikTok also find the audience based on what’s in the ad, so a focused video performs better than a broad one.

UGC isn’t always the winner. For Mokki (sunglasses for kids), simple image ads also worked well. CMO Mattis Ohana Goksøyr wrote to us: “Wow, even the statics are working so well! Great job, guys, fantastic.” That’s why we always test several formats against each other.

Common types of UGC ads

• Review: a person tells you what she bought, why, and what happened next.
• Demo or unboxing: the product shown in use, ideally with hands in the shot.
• Problem and solution: opens with a problem the customer recognizes, then shows the solution.
• Founder or employee on camera: works well for service businesses, where people buy from someone they trust.

UGC isn’t influencer marketing

An influencer lends you their audience. You pay for their reach, and the content lives on their channel. A UGC creator makes content you use in your own ads, aimed at your own audience, and doesn’t need a single follower. You’re buying the content, not the reach.

The two can be combined. With partnership ads, you run the ad from the creator’s profile, but with your budget and your targeting. For Mokki, we recruited creators with detailed scripts and ran the ads that way.

How to get UGC

• Ask your customers to film. Free and authentic, but it’s slow, the quality is uneven, and you can’t control what they say. Good as a supplement.
• Hire a UGC creator. Faster and easier to direct. Expect a few thousand kroner per video in Norway. (Are you a creator yourself? We’re recruiting.) The most common mistake is buying one video and running it for months. Ads wear out, so you need new variants regularly.
• Have it made continuously as part of running your ads. That’s how we work: we write hooks, edit raw footage, make 10+ new ads a week and scale the ones that work. We’ve made more than 5,000 ads for our clients. Our UGC service and our full production.

What UGC doesn’t fix

If your tracking is broken or your landing page makes it hard to find the price or the form, it doesn’t matter how authentic the video feels. Fix the measurement and the page first, then the content. Clinics and aesthetic treatments have their own rules: no before and after images, not even in UGC.