UGC videos: the brief and script your creator films from

A UGC video is content that looks like it came from a customer and was in fact commissioned by the brand. That sentence sounds like a contradiction and is not. The creator genuinely uses the product, films it themselves on a phone in their own home, and speaks in their own words. What the brand supplies is direction: which hook, which objection to answer, which feature the camera has to show.

The distinction people trip over is the one against influencer content. An influencer is paid for access to an audience, so follower count is the product and the post lives on their profile. A UGC video is paid for as a deliverable, so the audience is irrelevant and the file comes to you. Plenty of the best UGC performers have a few hundred followers and no ambition to grow them, because what they are good at is talking to a lens for thirty seconds without sounding like an advert.

The practical consequence is ownership. You license the footage, you put it in your ad account, and you keep running it as long as it converts, which is a completely different asset from a post that disappears down someone else feed.

Six formats cover almost everything that gets requested, and they answer different objections. Ordering the wrong one is the most common reason a batch underperforms: a demo will not fix a trust problem, and a testimonial will not explain a complicated product.

The pattern that works for a first order is three different hooks on one format rather than one video of each. If a single video underperforms you cannot tell whether the creator, the hook, or the product was the problem. Three variations tell you something.

Fifteen to thirty seconds for cold paid traffic, and up to forty-five when the product genuinely needs explaining. The number matters far less than where the information sits inside it. Hook in the first three seconds, product visible by second five, the single strongest proof point by second twelve, and a clear next step at the end.

Ask for the raw footage alongside the edit and the length question mostly goes away. With raws your team can cut a six-second version for a top-of-funnel test, a twenty-second version for retargeting, and a square crop for feed placements, all from one shoot. That is the cheapest content multiplier available and most brands never ask for it.

On specs: 9:16 vertical at 1080 by 1920 is the default for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Ask for a 1:1 or 4:5 crop as well if you run Meta feed placements, and tell the creator to leave headroom at the top and bottom of frame so platform UI does not cover a caption.

Across the US market individual videos commonly price from the mid double digits into the low hundreds, and the spread is driven far more by the license than by the filming. Two creators can quote for the same thirty-second vertical video where one includes perpetual paid-ad rights across every channel and the other includes thirty days of organic use on your own account. Those are not the same product. That fee is paid to the creator you hire directly.

UGCMarketplace prices the briefing step separately from the video itself: the first brief is free with no account, Pro is $29 a month for unlimited briefs and scripts with clean downloads, and Studio is $79 a month for agencies briefing many products. Compare creator quotes on cost per usable, runnable asset rather than cost per file: a cheap video you are not licensed to advertise with has cost you its full price for nothing.

For the per-creator view, UGC creator packages breaks down what each bundle actually includes, and UGC platform pricing compares what the vendors themselves charge.

Only if the license says so in writing, and this is where most brands lose money. Under US copyright law the creator owns what they filmed the moment it is recorded. Paying an invoice does not transfer that. What transfers it is a written license naming the channels, the term, the territory, and whether whitelisting is included.

The expensive version of this lesson is predictable: a gifted or cheaply licensed video quietly outperforms everything else in the account, someone tries to scale spend behind it, and the answer from legal is no. Now you are renegotiating with a creator who knows precisely how much leverage they have.

UGCMarketplace does not broker any of that; the brief can name the usage scope you want, but the license itself is between you and the creator you hire. Ask three questions and get the answers in writing before anything is filmed: can I run this as a paid ad, for how long, and on which platforms. UGC usage rights covers what a proper license needs to contain.

Not here, and the reason is regulatory as much as creative. In US advertising a testimonial is a claim about a real person actual experience with a product. The FTC Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, effective October 2024, prohibits testimonials from people who do not exist or who never used the product, and the penalties are per violation rather than per campaign.

There is a separate, purely commercial reason. The whole mechanism of UGC is that a viewer believes a real person is talking to them. Synthetic presenters get identified quickly by exactly the audiences most likely to buy, and once a viewer decides an ad is fake, nothing after that lands.

UGCMarketplace does not supply or verify creators, so writing "uses the product before filming, real person, 18 or older" into the brief itself, and confirming it with whoever you hire, is the step that keeps you compliant. That is worth treating as a requirement, not a footnote. The legal detail is in AI UGC testimonials and the FTC rule.