If you spend any time in DTC marketing circles, you'll hear the same advice repeated until it loses all meaning: "You need UGC." And that's true. User-generated content is probably the single most effective ad format for direct-to-consumer brands running on Meta and TikTok right now. But the gap between knowing you need UGC and actually producing UGC that performs is enormous, and most brands fall straight into it.

I've spent the better part of eight years running Y'all, a boutique performance marketing and creative agency, and UGC has been central to our creative strategy for most of that time. We run it for food and beverage brands, health and wellness companies, beauty brands, CPG products across the board. And the pattern I keep seeing is brands who technically "do UGC" but treat it like a checkbox rather than a system. They hire a creator, hand them a script, get back something that looks like a testimonial but feels like a commercial, and then wonder why their ad performance is flat.

So let me walk through what we've learned about making UGC actually work, because the details matter more than most people think.

The Creator vs. Influencer Distinction Matters More Than You Think

This is the hill I'll die on: creators and influencers are fundamentally different, and conflating them is one of the most expensive mistakes DTC brands make.

An influencer has an audience. That's their value proposition. You're paying for access to their followers, their reach, their parasocial relationship with their community. And that can be useful for certain things. But when it comes to performance advertising, follower count is mostly irrelevant. What you need is someone who can make content that looks and feels real, someone who is good at the craft of creating video or photos that play as organic rather than produced.

We specifically seek out creators rather than influencers for our ad content. A creator with 2,000 followers who knows how to light a kitchen counter and talk naturally about a product will outperform a creator with 200,000 followers reading from a teleprompter almost every time. The reason is simple: the content has to survive in a feed full of real posts from real people. If it looks like an ad, it gets scrolled past. If it looks like something a friend posted, it gets watched.

This distinction also changes how you evaluate talent. You're not looking at engagement rates or audience demographics. You're looking at the quality of their content, the naturalness of their delivery, and whether they can take a concept and make it their own.

Why Scripts Kill the Whole Point of UGC

Here's where most brands and agencies get it wrong. They hire a creator, write them a detailed script with specific lines and talking points, and expect them to deliver it verbatim. The result is content that technically features a real person but sounds exactly like a brand wrote it. Because a brand did write it.

We don't give creators scripts. We give them parameters. There's a real difference.

A script says: "Start by saying 'I've been using [product] for three weeks and I can already see a difference in my skin.' Then hold up the product and say 'What I love about it is the clean ingredients list.'"

Parameters say: "Talk about your experience with the product. Focus on what surprised you about the results. Show the product in your actual space, not staged. Keep it under 60 seconds."

The second approach produces content that is messier, less predictable, and dramatically more effective. When you give creators room to interpret a concept in their own voice, the results play as organic and actually different from each other. That last part matters a lot, because one of the biggest advantages of UGC is creative diversity, and you lose that completely when every creator is reading the same script.

We have an internal creator on our team who can make content quickly as a testing ground, but the bulk of our UGC comes from external creators who bring their own perspective. The combination of clear strategic direction and creative freedom is what makes the content feel real.

The Andromeda Reality: Why Creative Diversity Is the Real Game

If you're running ads on Meta in 2026, you need to understand how Andromeda works, because it completely changes how you should think about UGC production. (I wrote a full breakdown of what Meta's Andromeda update actually changed if you want the detailed version.)

Meta's delivery engine continuously tests your creative across different behavioral clusters. It expands distribution when predicted outcomes look strong, and it contracts when they weaken. What this means in practice is that creative diversity is foundational to performance, not optional. When you're running the same three ads with minor variations, the system learns slowly, performance plateaus, and costs climb as the novelty decays.

When you have a diverse set of creative, different messages resonate with different audience segments, unexpected pockets of efficiency show up, and you can scale spend without forcing it. Broad targeting paired with diverse creative consistently outperforms narrow targeting paired with limited ads.

This is why we think about UGC as a system rather than a tactic. For a typical client spending $20K to $40K a month, we're producing 10 to 20 concepts with a mix of video, UGC, and statics. Each concept gets two to four variants. That volume sounds like a lot until you realize that Meta's algorithm is hungry for fresh creative and will burn through a small batch faster than most brands expect.

Building a UGC System That Scales

Most brands approach UGC as a one-off: hire a creator, get some content, run it until it fatigues, repeat. That works at small scale but falls apart as you grow. The brands that get the most out of UGC treat it like a production system with repeatable processes.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Creator sourcing becomes ongoing rather than project-based. You're always looking for new creators, testing small batches of content, and identifying who produces work that converts. Just because a creator is expensive doesn't mean their content will hit. We've seen $200 creators outperform $2,000 creators plenty of times. Performance marketing doesn't reward shortcuts in that way. (If you're evaluating agencies to help with this, I wrote about the questions worth asking before you sign.)

Briefing gets standardized but stays flexible. Every brief should cover the strategic angle (what problem are we solving, what emotion are we targeting, what's the call to action) without dictating the execution. The creator needs enough direction to be on-strategy and enough freedom to be authentic.

Performance feedback loops back into sourcing. The media buying team and the creative team need to be talking to each other constantly. Tools like Motion help with creative analytics, but the real work happens in the conversation between teams. At Y'all, our performance director and creative director overlap specifically on this: what's working in the ads informs what we brief next. Reading ad comments is part of this too. Yasine is obsessive about it, and while people say silly stuff in ad comments, there are real insights about how audiences are responding to different creative approaches.

Whitelisting is a tool, not a starting point. We get asked about creator whitelisting a lot, and our recommendation is to test content from your own account first. See how it performs. If a specific creator's content is working well, then go to that creator (or find a similar one) and run from their page. The mistake I see most often is brands locking into expensive whitelisting deals before the creative has proven itself. You end up paying a premium for months, and then when the contract is up, the creator raises their rate because they know you're dependent on them.

What Makes UGC Actually Convert

The operating principle behind effective UGC is that structure is hidden inside realism. The content looks unscripted and spontaneous, but the best-performing pieces share common elements.

A relatable person. Not a model, not someone who looks like they stepped out of a brand photoshoot. Someone the target customer can see themselves in.

A personal story, even a brief one. Before and after framing works well, but so does "I was skeptical and then this happened." The specificity matters. Vague claims like "this product changed my life" land with zero impact compared to "I've been using this for three weeks and my partner actually commented on the difference."

Visual or experiential proof. Show the product being used in a real setting. Show the texture, the packaging, the routine. Anything that moves the content from "telling" to "showing."

Weak UGC is overly scripted, vague, or brand-centric. It talks about the brand's mission statement instead of the customer's experience. It uses marketing language that no normal person would ever say out loud. When you watch a UGC ad and you can tell someone wrote the copy in a conference room, the audience can tell too.

The Structural Storytelling Approach to Variants

One thing we've moved away from is pure hook testing, where you swap the first three seconds of a video and keep everything else the same. We can still use the same content, but we try to think about it structurally from a storytelling standpoint. How can we alter the piece so the entire structure and message is different?

That's how we get Andromeda-optimized variants on UGC or video. Instead of testing "which opening line grabs attention," we're testing fundamentally different narratives built from the same raw material. One variant might lead with the problem, another with the result, another with a specific moment of surprise. Same creator, same product, completely different story arc.

This matters because Meta's system treats each variant as a genuinely different piece of creative, which means each one can find its own audience. Three hook variants on the same video are really just one piece of creative with three intros. Three structural variants are three pieces of creative that happen to feature the same person.

Middle Funnel UGC: The Piece Most Brands Skip

A lot of the conversation around UGC focuses on top-of-funnel prospecting ads, and that makes sense because that's where the volume is. But UGC works at every stage of the funnel, and the middle is where most brands leave the most value on the table.

We've been building what I'd call creator testimonial compilations for some of our clients. The process is straightforward: take five or six creators who've worked with the brand, including ambassadors, and stitch their clips together into a collage video of real people talking about their experience. For one health and wellness client, the focus was recovery time, and hearing multiple people independently confirm the same benefit is more persuasive than any single testimonial.

This type of content works especially well for retargeting. Someone who's already seen a top-of-funnel ad and visited the site doesn't need to be introduced to the product again. They need reassurance. And a compilation of real people saying "yeah, this actually works" provides that in a way that branded content can't match.

How We Think About UGC at Y'all

Our creative strategy process folds in a few things beyond the standard market research. We look at organic videos that are trending, both in our clients' categories and adjacent ones. We look at what formats are working across platforms. And we look at ad comments on live campaigns to understand how people are actually responding.

Our creative director leads this process along with the team, and she interfaces with our director of performance on the performance side so that creative strategy stays tied to what's actually moving the needle in the account. The creative and media buying sides of the business can't operate in silos. When they do, you end up with beautiful content that doesn't convert and performance targets that don't inform creative direction.

We parallel-path creative strategy and UGC with media buying from the start of every engagement. During the first week with a new client, while we're getting hands-on with account management, the creative team is already developing the strategy and briefing out to creators. That parallel approach means we're not waiting weeks to get fresh creative into the account.

For brands looking for a performance marketing agency that treats creative as a first-class part of the media buying equation, that's what we're built for. We combine creative production and media buying under one roof because we've seen what happens when they're separated: slow feedback loops, misaligned priorities, and content that looks good in a deck but underperforms in the feed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is UGC in DTC advertising?

UGC stands for user-generated content. In the context of DTC advertising, it refers to ad creative that features real people (usually creators, not actors) using and talking about a product in a natural, unscripted style. The content is designed to blend into social media feeds rather than look like a traditional advertisement.

How much does UGC cost for DTC brands?

Creator costs vary widely, from $200 per video to $2,000 or more depending on the creator's experience and deliverables. The cost doesn't reliably predict performance. We've seen inexpensive creators produce top-performing ads and expensive creators produce content that flops. The more important investment is in the briefing and creative strategy behind the content.

Should I give creators scripts or let them freestyle?

Neither extreme works well. Detailed scripts produce content that sounds like an ad, and complete freestyle produces content that's off-strategy. The sweet spot is providing clear parameters: the strategic angle, the key benefit to focus on, the general tone, and a time constraint. Let the creator bring their own voice and delivery style within those guardrails.

What's the difference between a creator and an influencer for DTC ads?

An influencer provides access to an audience through their following. A creator provides content-making ability. For performance advertising, content quality matters more than audience size. A creator with a small following who makes great content will typically produce better-performing ads than an influencer with a large following who makes mediocre content.

How many UGC ads should I be running at once?

It depends on your ad spend, but the general principle is that Meta and TikTok's algorithms need creative diversity to perform well. For a brand spending $20K to $40K a month, we typically produce 10 to 20 concepts across video, UGC, and static formats, with two to four variants per concept. Running fewer than five or six distinct pieces of creative at a time usually leads to faster fatigue and higher costs.

What is whitelisting and should I do it?

Whitelisting means running ads from a creator's social media account rather than your brand's account. It can improve performance because the content appears more organic in the feed. Our recommendation is to test content from your own account first. If a specific creator's content performs well, then pursue a whitelisting deal. Starting with whitelisting before the creative has proven itself is a common and expensive mistake.

How does UGC fit with Meta's Andromeda algorithm?

Andromeda rewards creative diversity. UGC is one of the most effective formats for producing diverse creative at scale because different creators naturally produce different content from the same brief. Combining UGC with static images and produced video in the same ad sets gives Meta's system the variety it needs to test across different audience segments and placements.

How do I measure whether my UGC is working?

Look at the same metrics you'd use for any ad creative: click-through rate, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend. But also pay attention to engagement signals like video watch time, comments, and saves. High-performing UGC tends to generate longer watch times and more genuine comments than branded content. Reading those comments can also give you qualitative insight into how the audience is receiving the message.

Let's Talk About Your Creative

If you're a DTC brand spending on ads and your UGC program feels like a guessing game, I'd be happy to look at what you're running and share some honest feedback. We do this all the time and there's no pitch attached. You can reach out or check out some of our work at yall.co/case-studies.