The average view time of a traditional branded ad online?

7.9 seconds.

The average view time of a UGC ad?

17.8 seconds.

That's 2.2x longer. And the reason is simple: by the time you realise it's an ad, you're already hooked.

This came up in a recent episode of The Content Business, and it perfectly captures why UGC (User Generated Content) is one of the most powerful tools in advertising right now. Yet most brands still aren't making the most of it.

In its simplest form, UGC is when a creator makes content and a brand uses that content to advertise.

No actors. No production crew. No six-week approval process. Just a real person, on camera, talking naturally about a product in a way that feels like a recommendation rather than an ad.

It’s an add-on to influencer marketing, and increasingly, it’s becoming the most valuable part of the deal.

Brands aren’t just paying for a creator’s audience anymore. They’re paying for the content itself, and then distributing it across their paid media channels, their website, their social ads. The creator creates it. The brand amplifies it.

And it is outperforming almost every other form of paid media right now.

There's something counterintuitive happening in advertising.

The worse it looks, the better it performs.

One creator tested this over 30 days. Same content, static camera vs. handheld and shaky. The imperfect version won every time.

In an age where AI makes everything look flawless, imperfection has become the signal for realness. Inflections in your voice, a slightly off angle, unscripted delivery. These things tell the audience this is a human, not a brand machine.

AI makes everything perfect, and perfect becomes beige. The brands winning right now are the bright orange ones who've leaned into being a bit rough around the edges.

When a brand builds a traditional ad, the process looks like this: brief the team, debate the concept, brief the agency, film, edit, get approvals, publish, wait for the learning phase, test, repeat.

The time cost alone is enormous. And most brands don't factor it in because they don't physically pay the people sitting in those meetings.

UGC removes almost all of that. Brief the creator, they make the content, you put budget behind it. No production delay. No approval bottleneck. And the conversion rate is better.

If you're still building traditional ads while UGC exists, it's worth asking why.

Brands don't just have to use UGC content from their own accounts.

You can put a paid budget behind content posted directly from the creator's account. This is called whitelisting, and the ad shows up in someone's feed looking exactly like an organic post from a creator they may already follow.

It can't look less like a brand ad. It can't feel more trusted.

The deal structure that makes this work: a flat fee for the creator, an affiliate element to incentivise performance, and the brand puts ad spend behind the video. As the video performs, the creator earns more through affiliate. As the creator earns more, they push harder.

Everyone wins.

Follower count is largely irrelevant for UGC.

A brand isn't buying your audience in this model. They're buying your face, your voice, and your ability to talk about a product in a way that feels real. That content could end up with £100k+ of paid budget behind it and generate a quarter of a million in revenue.

The £1,000 paid to a creator with a few hundred followers suddenly looks like one of the best deals the brand has ever done.

For creators just getting started, UGC is one of the fastest routes to earning money, long before you have the audience size to land traditional sponsorships.

$37 billion was spent in creator ad spend last year.

The brands making the most of it aren't just paying for posts. They're squeezing every possible piece of value from the content they commission. Paid social, website, TikTok strategy, Meta ads. Every element of their advertising incorporates the content they get from working with creators.

If you're doing influencer marketing and not securing the rights to use that content in your paid ads, you're leaving a lot on the table.

Want to structure creator campaigns that deliver both the partnership and the paid ad creative? Drop me a message.

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