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ABOUT OUR GUESTS
NGOZI OGBONNA | Mosaic Group | NATALIIA DROZD | Fabulous | NICK CANDLER | KRISTINE PRIGARSKA | Liftoff | CRYSTAL DUNCAN | Tinuiti KEY HIGHLIGHTS

💡 How UGCs came on the horizon

🖼 How UGC strategy differs across different apps and different verticals

🕹 How the approach differs for gaming and non-gaming apps

🧰 The most effective formats for UGCs

💃🏿 UGCs with content creators vs. influencers

⚡️ Best practices to hook users in the first few seconds

🎭 Challenges when working with influencers

🏜 What does the actual process of recruitment look like?

💵 Planning budgets for content creators

🎞 The process of directing a shoot remotely

📑 The legal aspects of working with UGCs

📔 What does the brief look like?

 🧮  UGCs, animated ads, display ads or influencers – how to prioritize?

🔱 How does the approach differ across channels?

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth

Let’s start by understanding how you guys saw the potential for UGCs. What got you interested and intrigued? 

Ngozi, perhaps we can start with you. Tell us about the time when you first started testing UGCs and what inspired that?

Ngozi
Several years ago we started seeing the marketing and cultural shift onto more authentic lo-fi content. It seemed like everyone was a creator and can be a creator, and so the shift away from having super polished, highly produced content to content that people can shoot on their phone – this was a great opportunity. We don’t have to spend a lot of money or a lot of time and you can get content up quickly, test, iterate and just really have fun with it without worrying about whether it looked really great and how much money you needed to spend to get that.

 Shamanth
Yeah, it was very much a social shift that started to happen. Nataliia, curious to hear what your first experience was?

Nataliia
For me, the most important part was we just wanted to have different types of content. 

The first platform where I used UGC was actually Snapchat. So Snapchat by its nature, was a platform which was not tailored to Facebook banners type of content. So by being inventive, we figured out that for this platform, UGC is something that works best and we scaled this approach on other channels and it turned out that it worked.

So I would say it was the need to be experimental and find new concepts to iterate and work with. 

 Shamanth
It’s easy to forget Snapchat was on the horizon way before TikTok was and for a lot of us Snapchat was a big experimental channel. I’m curious, that’s where you guys started, but what elements of your UGC strategy have changed over time and what differences have you seen across different apps and different verticals? Nick, I’m curious if you have anything to share here?

Nick
Yeah, I feel like the changes happened as changes on socials happened like the scaling of TikTok and sort of more content oriented skits happening. I saw things really shift from being very social proof focused, like first person perspective, more towards content listicles like stuff that looked really native for the platforms, just in terms of differences and strategies across different apps and verticals. 

I don’t know I’m not the best person to speak to this, but I think

one thing I see is that apps that have really high LTVs or need help with getting people over the hump on purchasing, I see a lot more social proof, talking heads sort of stuff.

 Shamanth
Great and certainly the specific formats within UGCs have shifted as well, and I think that’s great to see and evolve. 

Ngozi, I’m curious, what have you seen in terms of how the UGC strategy has evolved? 

Ngozi
Yeah, I agree with Nick. It is really the changes in the proof mechanisms. If you’re looking for credibility, you want to have content creators or influencers or even figureheads that are notable and aligned with the type of content or product or service that you are promoting a lot more elements of reviews and how people are using the product, whether it works, how it works for them, and really showcasing usage while trying to also integrate the ad within existing content so it feels organic. It’s not so much of a hard sell, but how is this amazing product you know benefiting someone that I value their opinion or I want to aspire to be. 

 Shamanth
I think what I’m also hearing you say is just making it native to the platform where it is shown, right. TikTok is toying with it, making it more dance and music driven. And as Nataliia shared earlier with Snapchat, the first step was to make it Snapchat native. 

Crystal, you work across a variety and range of apps and I’m curious what you’ve seen in terms of differences between different verticals and how this has changed over time?

Crystal

I think the vertical piece is really interesting because I come from an agency background so I could work across multiple different brands under different verticals. So from our perspective it’s, we check a couple boxes on the list. It’s really, who they are, is it relevant to the person actually consuming the content? Do they care who that person is? Is there relevancy there? What they’re saying? So we just talk about trust. Trust is a huge one. 

What are they talking about? Are we throwing so much marketing where everyone’s like, I’m just gonna scroll through that. I don’t care. 

And then lastly, I think, we just hit the nail on the head. Use cases are huge. We could all have the same pen, but we could use it 12 different ways. So how are we using these use cases to tell the story to the different audiences out there? So those are kind of the three checklists we start with, as we’re thinking about different verticals and different.

 Shamanth
Yeah. And like you said, it really can’t be marketing speak. It really needs to flow much more naturally. I think that lines up with what Ngozi said, what Nick had to share as well.

And Kristine, going over to you something you do is work with both games and non-gaming apps. How do you see the approach differ for games versus non-gaming apps when it comes to UGCs? 

Kristine
From my experience, actually across the board, there’s more parallels than differences in terms of UGC, but there are some differences. So firstly, the choice of the creator actually matters a lot for all the apps that you’re working with. You need to know your target audience and pick the right creator for you, could be an influencer or an actor. It depends what your target audience really wants. 

Internally we’re using Game Refinery as a tool to understand our target audience and that will give us a more in-depth understanding of the person on the receiving end of the ad. Also across the board,

we’ve seen that using an influencer and less known person performs better than a celebrity which was quite a surprise for us because those celebrities attract the most users, but it turns out that influencers performed much better. So we see that relatability that everyone has mentioned today already, that actually matters the most. People want to see organic selfie style TikTok style videos and they tend to perform best. 

But when we talk about gaming in specific what works really well is combining actual gameplay, a core gameplay within the video as well. So you can, there’s so many options that you can do with gaming because you can do a split screen video with the reactions. You could get somebody overlaid on a video describing what the gameplay is like. There’s differences in gaming that you can enhance on. 

 Shamanth
Sure. Since you mentioned Game Refinery, it sounds like you’re using that to understand user motivations, player motivations, and build ads based on that. I think that definitely makes sense and it’s certainly something a lot of folks have used lately just in the last couple of years. I know folks who, even if they don’t use Game Refinery, Facebook popularized this model called the Big Catch Playbook which I highly recommend folks take a look at if they’re not ready for a tool like Game Refinery. 

I know Nick and Ngozi, you guys mentioned some of the formats that have changed over time. I’m curious to hear what are some of the formats that you see being the most effective lately? And if you have any examples, that would be great to hear as well. Nick if you wanna take a shot. 

Nick
I’ve tried a bit of everything and it does feel pretty brand dependent, so this is probably unique to Calm, but we really struggle to make a lot of the typical UGC stuff work. Fabulous has these amazing UGC creatives that for some reason don’t really fit with our brand. But

one thing that really stuck was oddly satisfying videos. It’s also pretty amazing what you can do from a DIY perspective there. The team kind of hopped on this and we had two of our top creatives were things that people just made in their kitchens. One was like a bread baking thing with ASMR where they were tapping the loaf and like another was kinetic sand. We also spent millions of dollars sometimes on really high production value stuff and something that someone lifted up in the kitchen totally crushed it. 

 Shamanth
Yeah. I have certainly seen a lot of ASMR stuff on the hypercasual side of things. It’s crazy and interesting to see how universal that seems to be, and that’s worked for UGCs as well, UGCs for subscription apps. 

Kristine, I’m curious what you are seeing work well in terms of formats lately. Again, with any examples that you feel you can share.

Kristine
Actually, unlike Nick, we’re seen lots of success with just talking heads into the camera. But we have seen that there’s a specific type of talking head that works. It’s usually female led content: very, very natural. Not too much post-production. We have also tested, for example, a famous pug in our tests and the female talking had actually performed much better when we thought. It’s quite cute that dogs are actually trending everywhere. You know, the internet is a great resource, to see so many cute videos. Turns out that female has actually performed best. 

At Liftoff we’re actually now trying to test interactive solutions with UGC and by that I think that would be, you know when you’re playing, you are within an app and you are offered to see this ad and interact with it like a mini game. There could be a UGC cutout reacting to you playing the game. So if you’re succeeding, the little person starts dancing or there could be somebody expressing sad emotions when you’re losing. 

So it’s something that we’re exploring at the moment. I think it’s gonna be quite an interesting test in the future. 

Ngozi
Something else thematically that has been consistent is the testimonial, the tutorial. If you think about beauty, women  are putting on makeup, trying a foundation or a new lipstick and talking about their experience with that. 

On one of our apps on photo editing they’re using it to erase the background and touch up content specifically in that creative and just you know, testimonial generally if you’re trying a new dress or new shoe or whatever that product is and how you used it and how you feel about it, I think that thematically tends to really do well. Just again, conveying the value that you have received from that product. 

 Shamanth
So I’m hearing a couple of big themes. One is how to, which is almost like a demonstration of how the app works, which could even just be for gaming in terms of showing the gameplay itself. The next could be transformation. A before and after with a first person testimonial. And like Kristine mentioned the interactivity. 

I think that could be very interesting and very cool as well. I’d be very curious to see how that continues to evolve.

We briefly talked about influencers. Crystal, you work quite a lot with influencers. So how do you decide between using UGCs with creators versus influencers? What would you say are the pros and cons of each?

Crystal
I think that from our perspective, the decision is always driven by the strategy and what we want the outcome to be. So if we set up the strategy, understanding the KPIs and what we’re trying to do, it then naturally kind of drives us towards if we want influencers, if we wanna do UGC, and there’s a lot of other factors along the way that could change some of that, right? Everything from usage rights. When you work with influencers, you have got to negotiate usage rates and maybe that’ll fit in the budget and maybe it won’t. 

So from our perspective, starting with the strategy, the framework and understanding what we’re trying to get out of the end of the project is really what gives us the good foundation to build on that. The rest really falls into place on what we’ve got ability to do from a budgetary perspective or an availability perspective. 

 Shamanth
Yeah, that makes sense, So if there’s a relatively small account, maybe you don’t want to go big influencer and the other way around too, if there’s a lot more leeway to build a brand, you certainly could go the influencer route.

Ngozi
I was gonna add that there’s a debate on our content creators. The same thing as influencers. Because you may be an influencer, you may not be really great at content creation, and you may be really great at content creation, but not considered an influencer or have that large following. 

So I definitely agree with Crystal. What is the goal? Is it driving awareness, driving consideration, getting more eyeballs onto your brand, or is it more DR focused? You want to have immediate conversion and you want activation quicker. That tends to lend itself to working with content creators who are really savvy with not only just content creation, but also working with brands and how they can integrate the brand story and pitch within their existing content.

 Shamanth
I think the other consideration I’ve seen in our experiences is that with creators or actors, we can direct them. Very specifically we can say, this is shot one, this is shot two, this is shot three. With influencers, that’s a little harder. So if it’s important to control your message, I think it makes sense to go the creator route if you can give them a little more leeway. Certainly the influencers could make sense. 

Nataliia I know you work quite a bit with influencers and UGCs as well. I’m curious how you think about the pros and cons of using influencers versus creators?

Nataliia
First of all, I’m a huge fan of content economy and I don’t like influencers. My opinion is very strong because I am first of all a performance marketer, and I don’t care that much about brands. For me, content creators are the best people to work with. Why? First of all, they generate content, the one you want. Second, usually they’re not that egoistic because as soon as a person becomes an influencer, especially more than 100 or thousand followers, whatever else, it’s harder to work with them. 

The other important topic,

as soon as most big influencers have managers or agencies behind them, which makes it way harder to work, the whole production cycle is way longer. Instead of having one brief and getting all the content you need in one week, it’ll take a couple of weeks just to get the legal agreement, transfer of rights, types of usage just, it’ll take time just to negotiate if you’re able to use this content on your own platform or just for example, boost as Spark Ads. 

So if you have a specific random awareness goal with millions in your bank account, go for influencers. But here we have to take into account that first of all, somebody who has a great following cannot translate into a great opening for your specific brand. 

Two, you need to diversify anyway, do not put all the content in one basket. 

Performance marketers who want to have content for Facebook ads, go to content creators because it’s an easier strategy, cheaper, faster, and actually way more creative. 

Influencers, when they have a big history and follower base, they will produce very similar content all over again because of their own style with their own hooks here and there. So actually it’s slightly less creative than people who have a lot of freedom.

 Shamanth
Yeah, a hundred percent. Oftentimes when we work with actors, it’s like a simple email and they get back to us in a day or two. I’ve seen that a lot of creators enjoy working on projects like ads. With influencers, it’s like, yeah, I’m doing my own thing. It’s not a very high priority. 

Not to get too much into that rabbit hole, but Nataliia, you resonate with everything you said, just in terms of the desirability of creators, and I know we will talk about celebrities and influencers a bit more down the line. 

I know we talked a bit about the formats but is there a typical structure of the script that you guys find most impactful? Are there specific props you guys look for? What do they use? What do the actors show? What do they look like? What are some of the directions you give some of the actors or influence actors or creators when you’re working with them? 

Ngozi I know you had quite a bit to share. Would love for you to share this.

Ngozi
So it really will depend on the creator, the product, the goal. It differs, but generally, like Crystal mentioned, you want to try to tell a story, whether it’s comedic or informative, engaging or all the above. But ultimately, what’s the problem? How was it solved? And, what is the pitch: to download or find more information or register, etc.? But ultimately generally,

it’s been successful for some of the projects I’ve been a part of to really collaborate and partner with the content creator to make sure that whatever we come up with is authentic to their existing content. Because their followers are following them for specific reasons. So if it’s something that’s too ad-specific or too much of a hard sell or pitch, it will be a turnoff. That will be counterintuitive to your goal, which is to try to drive attention to your brand. 

So really working closely and coming up with concepts lead by the creator of what they know has worked well in their past, what has resonated previously with their audience, and how we can kind of integrate the brand so it’s a little bit more seamless and just playing around with that. So it’s definitely going to differ depending on who you work with. 

 Shamanth
Definitely. As you said, it still needs to fit into the brand itself. Still needs to fit into the actual influencers and the messaging you’re looking at. One thing that’s been talked about is really the first three to five seconds or the hook. I’m curious to hear from you guys. 

Are there any best practices or anything that you see particularly effective in terms of hooks or the first few seconds that could be the text you guys use, the overlays, the physical props, anything that comes to mind for you guys? Crystal, I don’t know if you wanna take a stab at this?

Crystal
I wish there was a silver bullet. I think that from our perspective,

the sooner we can get either the brand message, the product message, or the value proposition, the better that we see some sort of message either retaining or action taken on that. Because again, if you can think of yourself as a consumer and say, “oh, I’m looking at this, oh, this is how it impacts me, I am more likely to take action on that.”

So again, I can’t say that I always put the brand name in the first two seconds, because that might be too ad-specific, that might not make sense. But if you can get the hook into how it benefits the end consumer quickly, that is where we have seen the benefits actually come through because the amount of time and attention spans are so minimal now that we need to do something to get people to stop the scroll and pay attention.

 Shamanth
Getting the value prop early on, I think that’s can be very effective. Although sometimes I’ve seen, and I’d be curious to hear if anyone has to add. Sometimes I’ve seen that if you have something funny or highly emotive that has nothing to do with the brand, that can still work well because then users continue to watch and they can see what the value proposition is. 

So generally, I think one of the things we aim for is really high emotion just in the first couple of seconds. And also physical tropes of some sort. 

I think one of the most carbon tropes we’ve seen is just money. Having them flash the money, of course, assuming that’s somewhat native to the product or having an object in the hand, that is somewhat unusual. That piques the user’s curiosity. 

To get into the actual tactics of how you work with creators or actors, how do you actually recruit these folks? Right. Nataliia, I know you talked a bit about some of the challenges with influencers such as creators. So what does the actual process of recruitment of these folks look like for you?

Nataliia
There are different processes. I’m lucky to be at Fabulous because people are approaching us offering, “Hey, I wanna make a video for you.” 

So first of all,

check your DMs and emails. A lot of young creators who are just starting their career are just asking different companies. And if you see that this person produces content that’s relevant to your audience, it’s one of the lowest hanging fruits you can get. So if you’re already a big brand, but you are just starting this UGC story, just try to check your inbox because very likely somebody is just waiting for your email. 

Other than that you can, there are a lot of platforms. But what I personally like to do is, first of all, I use a lot of social media and I see creators, I ask if we can work with them and then message them directly, especially if it’s a small-scale content creator, not a famous Instagram blogger or influencer. 

Very likely they’re responsive and they also usually have their email address. So the simplest and then the cheapest way is this. Usually they also like it very much because somebody paid attention to what they’re doing. 

There are also platforms such as Billo, where there are already a lot of creators on the platform and you can just find ones that work well for you. Billo works mainly for e-com, but it doesn’t mean it cannot work for apps and games. You just have to be specific and say I will not ship you any goods, but here is the thing, are you fine with it or not? 

 Shamanth
Excellent. 

Kristine, curious to hear what your process looks like?

Kristine
So it really depends on the type of creator we’re looking at. We have Liftoff influencers. Everyone externally calls it Jet Fuel. We have access to a large platform of influencers and then we can pick and choose whoever seems to resonate to the product the most.

In terms of celebrities, a good resource is Cameo. I think it’s quite trendy at the moment, and you can pick quite a few well-known actors, but you need to keep in mind that there’s gonna be some licensing in terms of how long you can run these ads, and there’s gonna be no changes and very little creative flexibility.

So that is something to keep in mind in terms of actors. 

If you need a little bit of support in post-production, they’re very helpful because they source the actors, they can help out with scripts and they can also do a little bit of post-production for you as well. So it really depends what type of creator you’re looking for. All of them obviously have pros and cons as we discussed. 

 Shamanth
Certainly, and Nataliia, like you said, the lowest hanging fruit is not that difficult to execute on. Look at your inbound or directly DM people. That’s certainly something we have done. Something that I think I would also encourage people to check out is TikTok Spark Ads. You will find a lot of very small influencers that are very affordable on Spark ads. 

Something we find effective is Backstage, which is a platform for actors where you can put up your brief. You’ll just have a lot of folks, a lot of inbound that way. So there’s just plenty of options to recruit great actors, great creators without blowing the bank. Hopefully folks took notes from this section on actual practical, tactical things they could do. 

To switch gears a bit. Let’s talk about budgeting. I know some of you guys already mentioned some of the challenges with big influences and just their enormous crazy rate cards. How do you guys decide and make decisions around the economics of a project? 

So how do you decide, what’s the current market rate? How is this gonna be a strong ROI or how do you guys think about it? 

Kristine would love to hear from you.

Kristine
Yeah, sure. Generally in terms of budgets, it’s quite easy. Everything gets dictated by the creators and third party providers. So there’s always room for negotiation. But just generally the main budget teller will be the creator themselves, but in terms of ROI. So Liftoff is a data driven company and whatever we create, we test who has lots of different data to identify the winning concept.

So therefore, we vigorously test all our new creatives, identify the trends and best practices. This enables us to continuously optimize our creatives. So therefore we have this live feedback loop. So we always know what actually works and which direction we should go into. 

 Shamanth
Certainly. Crystal, would love to hear from you how you think about the budgeting and economics of a UGC project?

Crystal
Yeah, I think I work pretty similar to what Kristine said and in some of the places that we coach our clients on where we potentially could save money or maybe lean in a bit further on negotiations or really around the deliverables and what we’re asking creators to do. 

Are we asking them to do something quick and easy? Versus asking them to maybe do five rounds of edits and do longer form videos and different iterations, or asking them to go somewhere versus filming it in their homes. 

All of these things that take more time, there’s one that we can trim back on some of those things. There’s a lot of places that we can hopefully negotiate with them to be a little bit more, effective on that. But I would say from our perspective also, Tinuiti is a performance agency. So whatever we’re spending from our clients, we’re looking for some sort of return or understanding on how it impacts the business. These fees that we’re paying creators or influencers, those do need to back out into something, whatever the KPI is for the project. So that’s just another measuring stick for us when we’re thinking through budgets and understanding who we can work with, who fits in budget, how much are we spending on the creation versus maybe the ad spend. How does that all work together?

 Shamanth
Sure. Our experience at Rocketship has also been that when we work with micro influencers, we can set the budget which again is one reason not to work with big influencers, and we can say, look, this is all our budget is. Because there’s so many micro influencers out there, they’re typically able to accommodate themselves – also assuming of course, it’s not a huge elaborate project to fit them. 

Which brings me to my next question – what does this shoot process typically look like when you guys work with creators? There’s like different ends of the spectrum. 

I know folks who are like, “we are gonna rent a warehouse, send somebody to direct a shoot”, folks who are more DIY. 

So what does that process look like for you guys? Nick, if you want to be sharing.

Nick

It’s just gonna be very dependent on the creative partner, the influencer or the brand. A lot of times it’s just gonna be in the kitchen as I talked about earlier, or the couple back and forths. Then, I know a lot of people bring in house. When you’re working with really large celebrities, it’s gonna be totally different, they’re gonna be a little picky. They’re gonna have a wardrobe, they’re gonna have their stylist, you’re gonna get billed for things you can’t believe, like $5,000 to do your nails. It might be really tight like when we worked with LeBron for 20 minutes, so there’s all this serious stuff and like one chance to get it right. So yeah, just very dependent.

 Shamanth
Yeah. Especially with celebrities, I imagine that’s a lot of small print to take care of. That’s crazy how you mentioned 20 minutes with LeBron. If you blow it, then that’s gone, so you really need to get that right. 

Nataliia, I know you did mention a lot of work you guys do with smaller influencers. How does the approach change for those folks? What does the shoot direction process look like? 

Nataliia
First of all, all the things Nick mentioned is why we don’t work with big influencers. What we really care about is efficiency at this stage. This is my mindset and this is why for me the most important thing here is, how much we are gonna pay for the video. 

In terms of shooting,

we do not restrict our influencers or content creators by anything. We just give don’ts, so don’t shoot the video in a dark room because we know the darker backgrounds perform worse than light ones. Don’t include any bottles of alcohol because TikTok algorithm bans them automatically. Even though you use it as a vase for your flower the AI will suspend the video. 

If there are any problems or anything that has to go done, we just say, “Hey, this is what went wrong.” But we are very, very hands off with this process, and usually when we give creators a lot of freedom, they produce really high quality content because they do what they want to do. One fun fact the best inside building types of videos are with white walls. It just works. I don’t why, but it works for us. 

 Shamanth
There’s something perhaps very pristine about that. 

Interesting that you talked about mentioning the don’ts, and I think that’s so important because we have a checklist as well internally at Rocketship where say we have a do’s and don’ts. 

There should not be a glare on the screen of the device that you’re showing. Show the device clearly, show the product clearly. Smile, have high energy, just a lot of things that we think are obvious but may not be obvious to the creator. 

We find it helpful to over communicate that upfront. We actually have a couple of articles and a checklist that we send every actor. Obviously the experienced ones know it already, but we send it anyway. If they need to re-shoot, you also need to tell them why, you don’t wanna be telling them, this is not good. You wanna be telling them upfront. So I think that definitely makes sense to have those guidelines, like you said, Natalie. 

Nataliia, I know you did mention some of the clauses and small print that you think about. Tell us more about that. So what do the legal aspects of working with UGCs, working with actors, creators or influencers if you will, what does that look like? What are some of the non-negotiable in your processes around the legal stuff? 

Nataliia
Things that are legal by platforms where you use this content. So like whenever you run ads on Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, anywhere else, they have their privacy policies. The most vivid example is if you have a bottle of alcohol on video, it’ll not allow to run it and add, but this is one part. 

The other part is about the usage of content. So what we love, this is a super important part for me and for our team in general because we want to be allowed to have full rights. When a content creator posts something, for example on their TikTok account and gives us a Spark ad code, we also want to have the video itself to try it on other platforms. All things like this have to be included as well as time for consideration.

Ideally the time frame for usage rights always unlimited, but some people are not happy with this. We try to get at least one year of rights because if the video is successful, we can run it as long as possible. If not, it’ll run for a week or two and it’ll be turned off. So this is one of the most important things. 

The other one is if we can have long-term collaboration, then for example, we agree on more videos and also terms and conditions. Something which is also very important. From one of my previous experiences, it’s important to ask your influencers/creators not to work with your competitors. Because there is nothing worse than seeing the same person advertising you and tomorrow your competitor. If you don’t have this clause, you cannot do anything about it because they’re not actually breaking any rules. So A legal rights, B asking for a non-competitive for at least a couple of months.

Ngozi
The non-compete is huge!  When I was with a sports media brand, we were really clear that, if you’re going to work around an app, you weren’t then also plugging in the same content on ESPN for instance, or referencing a competitor.

One thing I also wanted to add is compliance. So making sure and recommending that they hashtag and that they are clear. 

From a legal standpoint, not being misleading, giving them the flexibility and the creativity to do what they do, but also not integrating misleading language. As well as making sure that they are just really clear on what we want to. We are clear on what we want them to convey specifically. Try to integrate as much as the messaging as you can while again making sure that the content is fun and, and relevant and engaging.

 Shamanth
All of those are very valid, very important to button up your legal stuff. We work with a couple of products that are all for kids and there’s another layer of sensitivity there. So we really try and make sure all of the paperwork is buttoned up in that regard. 

We’ve been contrasting some of the UGC’s approaches with influences. How does your brief or guidelines that you share with folks differ for UGCs versus influencers? Crystal, since you work with both entering the spectrum, I’d be curious to hear from you. 

Crystal
On the UGC side, if creators are creating content that doesn’t live on their channel it can be more scripted, we can be more direct with what we want. With influencers you have to be a little more directivel with what you want and allow them to put their spin on it. So I think really understanding where the content is going to end up living and, and how we’re employing this person is hugely important. I think with UGCs you can be pretty direct with what you want and, and it kind of gives you a little bit more freedom as a brand.

 Shamanth
Obviously if you are managing UA channels or marketing mix you have different formats you could go with, UGCs, animated ads, display ads, or of course influencers. 

How do you guys prioritize one versus the other? What does that look like for you guys when you sit down to plan? Nick, if you wanna take a shot at. 

Nick
I would advise trying to be really responsive while also not over-indexing or under indexing super hard. So less quarterly budgets and more just being really lean in our process, so that when we see things working well in data, or when we have a certain idea we want to execute on it, we have the channels to make it happen really quickly.

 Shamanth
Yeah. We’ve talked a little bit about different channels. I know Nataliia, you talked about how you started billing UGCs for Snapchat. How does the process differ now? I don’t think Snapchat is as big. So it’s I imagine, TikTok, Facebook instance, so on and so forth. 

So how do you think about strategy by different channels or platforms?

Nataliia
In our case,

we have two strategies, one for TikTok & one for Facebook just because of the way people consume content is the most different in both. You can use those scripts anywhere else, DSPs, Google, etc. 

Everything depends on the type of the content you’re working with. If an influencer directed beautifully, it will very likely be way more similar, only the text will be different because for Facebook you have to make it more variants so it fits all different placements across Facebook. 

On TikTok, there’s just the vertical standard one. But the most important thing especially for us when working with UGC and content creators, is to make sure that the type of content we’re making actually fits the platform. 

The most important thing on TikTok is fonts. Users can actually identify if it’s a TikTok ad or if it was taken from another platform. The same actually applies to a Facebook reel because they have their own fonts, which are specific to their platform. So the best case scenario, you have footage without any fonts or without text on it, and then you adjust vendor platforms. 

So rule number one, make sure it looks natural to the habitat. 

 Shamanth
Yeah, and it shouldn’t stick out if you transport from one platform to another. 

Nataliia
Never. You can do it between Android and iOS, but you cannot do it from Facebook to TikTok. People will automatically figure out it’s an ad. This is what I love about TikTok ads. You don’t have to advertise. You have to tell a story. By telling a story, you have to give a value prop to how your product can make people’s life easier, better, nicer, funnier, etc. 

So first,  native to the platform with a nice story and clear value prop and only after that “we are here to make your life better.” 

We always try to make the app visible, but we don’t sell it. 

 Shamanth
Definitely. 

Crystal would love to hear your perspective again, you are working across channels. What does that approach look like across channels? 

Crystal
I think that Nataliia hit it on the head. Every single channel, every single platform has a different look and feel. So we encourage leaning into that platform. Maybe you can cut down versions of long form content to save some dollars here and there. So let’s say we did a long form YouTube video with an influencer. Can we take cutdowns of that to live in the Meta world? Sure. 

But it has to make sense where it is. 

 Shamanth
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And you definitely don’t want to, if you put a dancing video on Facebook or even Insta, it’s not always going to do that. Well, because it’s gonna be very clear. 

Nataliia
It’s actually, I have to admit if you go to, if you are very tight on budget and you don’t have design resources, Insta people are more receptive towards TikTok content than vice versa. More than 20% of videos in Reels have TikTok watermarks. So already content on Reels has originated from TikTok. If you’re right on budget, go with TikTok and put it on other platforms. But other than that, Insta and TikTok have different strategies.

Ngozi
These are comparable for the exact reason Nataliia mentioned. If you need to share content, platforms like Reels and TikTok tend to be more favorable. 

 Shamanth
Definitely. Kristine, would also love to hear from you on your perspective in gaming versus non-gaming. 

Does the planning process across different channels you know, TikTok, Facebook instead differ when you’re looking at gaming versus non-gaming? 

Kristine
Liftoff works differently. So our UGC creatives would be targeted to users through non-gaming and gaming apps. So you would see those ads within the apps. So therefore, we don’t necessarily know what the target audience is because our machine learning is targeting the right user. So we have adjusted what kind of content to push out in terms of target, but it’s a slightly different approach here. You kind of see a wider range of users. So it’s a slightly different approach to everyone else.

 Shamanth
So it’s harder to customize just because you are on a wider spread of apps on the programmatic ecosystem, if you will than just Facebook and Insta, which needs a very different approach. When you are on the Liftoff network, do you see a lot of success with TikTok style ads or more Facebook style first person testimonials ads? 

Are there specific formats that stick out to you when you’re looking at ads that do well on the Liftoff platform? 

Kristine
It really depends on a vertical and an app. It’s really hard to answer because there’s so many intricacies across the board. Yeah. For example, when we advertise dating apps, it’s TikTok content that tends to perform quite well, but at the same time, not as well as the talking head reviewing their experience or reviewing the app. 

There’s no one answer for all. It really is different. Even if it’s a dating vertical, there’s so many types of dating apps. So you need to approach each type of ads slightly differently. 

 Shamanth
What I’m taking away from what you say Kristine is that the approach for programmatic platforms like Liftoff needs to be different. It needs to be thought of differently and separately. This has been great, you guys. I know we are coming up on time and I do wanna leave a couple of minutes for Q&As from our audience. 

Q&A

Platforms where we can find creators. 

Backstage, Cameo, TikTok Creator Marketplace. 

How do you manage long-term creator collaborations manually? Or is there a good tool you can recommend?

Ngozi
I’ve built in-house and ambassador programs using creators across the longer term timeframe. Unfortunately it is manual dealing with the contracts and payments. But I’ve approached it as a partnership and mutually beneficial experience. I have the opportunity to have them be involved in focus grouping for an app. Giving them information on what’s coming up, getting their feedback on new features that we’re rolling out. So they have backstage access.

We’re trying to build a community and have it feel less transactional. So resource intensive and, and more manual. We’re looking at ways that we can reinforce that partnership element that we are helping them to grow and helping them to learn how to work with different brand partners.

So my experience has just been your manual processes and figuring out maybe different tools in-house that you can use to kind of just manage that entire process.

 Shamanth
Excellent. We have one last question: Have you had experience with UGC campaigns with fanart or fan edits of your games? 

I have actually done somewhat comparable things with a photo and video editing app where folks basically created their own self animation. This is an animation kind of app. So I think that’s the closest that I’ve seen that worked really well. I think that worked well because this was a product that required a lot of expertise.

So I think it’s definitely something that is worth highlighting. It’s definitely worth testing with fan art. If you have a game though, it might also make sense to combine that with gameplay. And as Kristine mentioned, you wanna be combining that with user motivations based gameplay as well, rather than only focus on the fan art. 

 Shamanth
Wonderful. Wonderful. Lots of notes, lots of takeaways. 

Thank you everyone for being around today. 

Thank you, and have a great rest of your day. Bye. 

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